I wonder what kind of indicators you are all using when choosing what to eat. According to the Report on the Survey on Awareness of Shokuiku (Food and Nutrition Education)" (Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries; March 2023), approximately 60% of Japanese people are choosing environmentally friendly foods, with domestic and locally produced foods being the main indicators used. But in what way are consumers connecting domestic and local production with the environment? It could be that they are choosing domestically produced food as it is safe, and locally produced food for its freshness, and have shifted concern for the environment onto the producer under the assumption that because their food is safe and fresh, the producer must be concerned about the environment. Or, it may be that Japanese restaurants and retailers have not been able to offer sufficient indicators for consumers.

Eco-Score, which assesses the environmental impact of food products based on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), was introduced in France and other European countries in 2021. Eco-Score is a comprehensive assessment of the scale of environmental impacts during each process of food production, processing, and distribution. Impacts are classified into five levels, from a high rating of "A," or green, to a low rating of "E," or red. In Europe, consumers are able to choose environmentally friendly food products using the color and letter rating on food labels as an indicator.

Each industry has begun to take on the challenge of Green Transformation (GX) with a view to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. GX is an initiative that involves reducing carbon dioxide emissions by promoting the use of renewable energy, such as solar and wind power, without relying on fossil fuels as much as possible, as well as changing the structure of industry and society, along with consumer lifestyles.

In response to this growing global interest in carbon-free societies, it is believed that in Japan, too, we will begin to consider the environment more clearly in terms of what kind of production, processing, and distribution the fish, seafood, seaweed, and other food on our dinner tables undergoes to reach us, and how much of an impact those processes have on the environment. In other words, consumers will likely come to develop a new value system regarding food.

For this reason, while it is uncertain whether or not Eco-Score itself will be introduced in Japan, it is expected that the country will adopt similar indicators. Meanwhile, do domestically and locally produced marine products really have a small environmental impact?

Since 2019, the Fisheries Agency has been promoting Smart Fisheries(*1) , which involves digitalizing data from activities in each process of production, processing, and distribution of marine products. As shown in the photo, the collection and accumulation of data such as information on operations and landings, which is necessary for more sophisticated resource assessment and management, is underway. Meanwhile, the Fisheries Agency also plans to gradually expand the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) system, which currently covers only eight species of fish, including tuna and squid. The aim of these efforts is the sustainable use of marine resources in the production process. TAC is a system for resource management that works by setting annual limits on catches by fish species and allocating catch quotas for each prefecture with coastal fisheries in accordance with actual catches. However, catch quotas for each prefecture tend to create competition between fishermen. Therefore, in recent years, the individual quota (IQ) system has started being introduced.

[Examples of Smart Operational Information in the Fishing Industry]

In Rumoi, the first city in Japan to introduce Smart Fisheries, sea cucumber fishermen are making use of "marine PLOTTER", an app that shows the real-time position information of ships traveling in consort, in collaboration with Future University Hakodate. Also, as a result of sharing catch volumes using a Fishery Digital Diary and implementing resource management based on the data, stocks are bouncing back to higher, more sustainable levels after overfishing caused them to dip. Recently, systems have been developed that use AI to suggest optimal fishing operations from data taken from the fishing diaries of experienced fisherman.

The IQ method is one of the operation methods of the TAC system. It manages resources by reallocating catch quotas allocated to prefectures to individual fisherman. The IQ method prevents competition between fishermen, therefore enabling more efficient fishing through information sharing among them. It can also be expected to have positive effects on both marine resources and the management of fishers, such as selective fishing of large-size, high-value individual fish, which allows smaller individual fish to remain, along with adjusting fishing seasons and catch volumes to meet demand, meaning that unit prices stay high.

By the way, according to statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the total global production volume of seafood, excluding seaweed, in 2020 was 177.75 million tons, of which 90.25 million tons came from the production volume of wild-catch marine products and 87.5 million tons from the production volume of aquaculture. In addition, the total of the top 10 countries accounts for about 70% of the world's total production volume; Japan ranks 10th with a total production volume of 3.75 million tons. Meanwhile, Europe's top country for fisheries, Norway, ranks ninth with a total production volume of 3.94 million tons, which is pretty much equivalent to Japan.

Here, I would like to compare several aspects of Japan's and Norway's fishing industries. First, if we look at the breakdown of total production volume, the production volume of Japan's wild-catch industry is 3.15 million tons and the production volume of its aquaculture industry is 0.6 million tons. Meanwhile, the same production volumes for Norway are 2.45 million tons and 1.49 million tons, respectively. In contrast to a global ratio of roughly 1:1, wild-catch fishing is the main backbone of both Japan's and Norway's fishing industries. Next, if we look at the number of fishing vessels, Norway has 5,857 vessels compared to Japan's 211,248. Assuming that the value of wild-catch production volume divided by the number of fishing vessels reflects the size of fishing management entities, the ratio of Norway to Japan is 1:0.036, which indicates that while Japan's wild-catch fishing industry is mainly composed of smaller fishing management entities, Norway's is structured around larger entities. While Norway, which introduced the IQ system in 1990, has succeeded in transforming its fisheries into a growth industry, the IQ system was introduced as part of a fisheries policy that anticipated a future trend toward larger fishing vessels through consolidation and the elimination of small-scale fishing management entities, and as a result of this structural reform of wild-catch fishing, the size of its management entities is increasing.

It is generally known that the higher the latitude, the lower the diversity of fish species, and Japan has 32 fish species whose annual wild-catch fishing production volume exceeds 10,000 tons, compared to 19 in Norway. Further, the top 15 fish species account for 80% of the total number of fish in Japan, while the top seven fish species account for 80% of the total number of fish in Norway. The small number of fish species subject to resource assessment and management is one of the factors that enabled Norway to introduce the IQ system at an early stage. Japan is beginning to introduce the IQ method through the promotion of Smart Fisheries, which has laid the groundwork for advanced resource assessment and management of a wide variety of fish species.