Seaspiracy - what you should know about it

The Netflix “documentary” Seaspiracy is another critical film making waves in the fish sector. The film’s dramatic staging, aggressive interview style and one-sided assessment of NGOs (in which only the vigilante organisation Sea Shepherd is portrayed in a favourable light) means that even viewers not familiar with the subject should have clear doubts about its objectivity.

Anyone who has a little more background knowledge on the subject, however, will notice after around five minutes that Seaspiracy is probably a film that is going to make full use of its artistic licence, when the death of a whale due to plastic is linked to the beaching of hundreds more. Although the film addresses important topics such as plastic pollution, by-catch, human rights violations and overfishing, it often misrepresents their scale. The origin of the data presented in the film and how this data compares to the correct figures has already been briefly summarised on the Sustainable Fisheries website, at least for some of the issues.

Even when looking at the corrected figures, however, one should be aware that these tend to be average values which can misrepresent the heterogeneity of the fish sector. A look at the graphic below, for example, shows the extent to which landed catches are monitored in different countries. Dark green means the catches are monitored, while pale green means they are not monitored. The obvious differences means that general statements such as “don't eat fish” differentiate very little between monitored and unmonitored catches. Rather, the film’s conclusion should be “Only eat fish from monitored stocks”, because monitored fish is very likely to be sustainable (a link that we are also trying to capitalise on as part of our commitment to the topic of traceability).