This article provides an overview of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the fishing sector over the world, including several economic, social, environmental, and health challenges that the fisheries have had to face during the early days of the health crisis, and some of them still continue today. These problems, in short, are translated into a decrease in seafood demand, loss of jobs, changes in food consumption habits, economic losses, or increased vulnerability of the industry. As a consequence, governments have been forced to implement regulations and measures in support of this sector. However, a positive aspect of the pandemic also stands out, the opportunity to transform the food system to be greener, more inclusive, and resilient against future shocks.
The generation of food loss and waste (FLW) is a global problem for worldwide politics. About one-third of the food produced ends up in the rubbish before it is consumed. For this reason, it is essential to design and implement new strategies along the food supply chain (FSC) with the aim of reducing this FLW at each stage. However, not only mass quantification should be considered, but also economic and nutritional performance. The novelty of this study is the definition of a methodology based on the “distance to target” approach by means of multi-objective optimization to evaluate the economic and nutritional cost produced by this FLW. This methodology was applied to the Spanish food basket in 2015. The results revealed that 80% of the total FLW generated in economic and nutritional terms is concentrated in the agricultural production (53.3%) and consumption (26.3%) stages. In the first stages of the FSC, fruits (Dn eq.= 0.7), cereals (Dn eq.= 0.61), and vegetables (Dn eq.= 0.57) were the furthest from the distance target due to the great amount of FLW generated. Moreover, according to the normalized weighted distances obtained from the minimization of economic and nutritional cost, pulses (Dn eq. = 0.05–0.03) and eggs (Dn eq. = 0.02) were the more efficient food categories. The methodology described in this study proposes a single index to quantify the economic and nutritional cost of different food categories to facilitate the decision-making process. This index makes possible the definition of reduction strategies focused on specific food categories and depending on the FSC stage.
Cantabria, a small coastal region of Northern Spain, is one of the biggest producers of gourmet tuna cans in Europe. The fish capture in the Cantabrian Sea and the subsequent transformation in a local processing plant give distinction to this product, which is widely marketed in cans of 105 g of net weight. This work evaluates for the first time the environmental profile of the whole supply chain of this product, from fishing, processing, and waste valorization to inter-stage transport and packaging management in the end-of-life. To this end, the life cycle assessment methodology was applied considering primary data from the stakeholders involved in the supply chain and analyzing the seven most studied categories in this sector. Results revealed that fishing and processing accounted for the majority of the environmental impacts, while valorization and end-of-life treatments only avoid less than 10% of the burdens. The most important findings are focused on the high dependence on fuel use, identified as a hotspot in most stages although low compared to other fisheries, and on the intensive use of resources, especially sunflower oil, which contributes more than 70% of the impact on the global warming potential of the processing. This current framework forces the enhancement of the efficiency of a sector that attempts to engage the challenge of societal sustainability, by identifying the critical points and guiding policy makers on the path to sustainable development.
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