32. Ethical Seafood Research

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WASSEEM (Voiceover clip) I mean, all of that is to say that passion is what drives me personally, you know, and belief that I can build something really exciting. And I'm working in an area that is really important and I can see every day that it's, like, I believe in what I'm doing and I think we're making a difference and so on and I think we can do a lot of great things. And that's what drives me, but yeah, it's difficult. And of course, like, there's no one to tell me what to do, you know. (Laughing), I actually never thought I'd be a founder or a director. I didn't think as a natural leader. I kind of just stumbled into this because of one small project I was doing that kind of grew into something bigger. But yeah, I think when you love what you're doing, you just do it anyway, you know.

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HOST (Voiceover): Hello and welcome back to the Animal Friendly Podcast. My guest today is Wasseem Emam, who founded the charitable organization Ethical Seafood Research. The goal of ESR is to promote an ethical seafood industry by implementing welfare practices and influencing policies. It is estimated that 120 billion farmed fishes worldwide endure immense suffering from a variety of causes, which can include overcrowding in barren pens, poor water quality, painful handling and slaughter methods, and stress from their unnatural environments. ESR aim to improve the lives of fishes by advancing ethical and sustainable practices in aquatic food systems. Their work centres around three pillars; research, training and education, and policy work. That's working with governments and international agencies.

Wasseem is the director and head of research at ESR. He holds advanced degrees in applied aquatic ecology and has spent over 15 years working with various organizations across the fisheries and aquaculture sector. Drawing on this background, Waseem recognized a critical gap. Aquatic animals are the most numerically exploited, yet the least protected animals in the food systems, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, where aquaculture is rapidly expanding.

From better slaughter methods and water quality monitoring to farmer training and policy advocacy, ESR works to embed animal welfare in aquaculture systems without compromising economic viability. So let's hear from Wasseem.

WASSEEM: It's nice to be here, Samantha. Thank you for having me. So I'm Wasseem Emam, as you said, and I am the founder and director of Ethical Seafood Research. We are a non-profit working to improve the lives of aquatic animals in the food system. We are heavily based in Africa and Egypt, where I'm from originally. This was a big country of operation for us, but we also have an office in Kenya and Tanzania, and I'm based in Spain currently. We are registered here, where we have a small project that we're working on.

We're kind of global, but I guess where we have the most impact is in African aquaculture. HOST: Do you travel around yourself or do you go to the fish farms yourself in the different places?

WASSEEM: Yeah, so we do have a team of people who are the more on the ground, you know, field workers, let's say. I know that’s not the right word, but people who go to the field more often. But I go a few times a year to the various places, you know, when we're launching a new project, when we're collecting data for something specific. So I'll go at the beginning. And of course, because I have family in Egypt, I try to check in with my team there whenever I can.

HOST: Yeah, that's something I actually wanted to ask you about. What would most of your day, your work involve? Is it research? Is it more heavily on research or teaching?

WASSEEM: I would say that when I'm at home, because I work from home most of the time, so at home, there's a lot of meetings just kind of either, you know, with funders or potential funders or donors, with partners kind of deciding on new projects or just following up on how things are going. I'd say meetings with stakeholders takes up a lot of my time.

There's a lot of research as well, you know, reviewing papers, writing papers, analysing data. And I write a lot of proposals myself for grants. I am always also very opportunistic. So I'm always…a big part of our work is also looking at who's doing what? And how can we partner with them? Keeping on top of the latest developments and how that affects our work. And we, you know, use certain technologies in the countries we work. And I attend a lot of conferences as well. Sometimes I speak, sometimes I present a poster. Sometimes I don't play a role at all, but just network. I'm a big networker. So I travel for events like that. And I also go to the field maybe a few times a year, but that's not a big, big part of my role, to be honest.

HOST: Do you find, like, so you've been in this quite a few years now, do you find there's more, slightly more emphasis on welfare or is that growing? Or is it part of that your work is to make that emphasis grow?

WASSEEM: Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I think because we work primarily in global South countries, that the welfare conversation is very, very absent, you know. And our role is to make sure it is part of the conversation. And that people think of it as part of their work. It's not an extra burden or layers. Actually, a lot of them are doing things that are welfare related, like health is part of good welfare. And so, OK, when I talk about welfare, really what I'm saying is let's remember that these are sentient beings, not objects, not just a resource, sentient beings that we are lucky enough to be able to grow and sell and consume. So let's not take that for granted. Let's treat them, let's give them a life worth living if we can, and then do whatever you want with the meat after. But don't treat them badly. That's our sort of entry point, you know. We don't take a position on, like, whether you should or shouldn't consume these. Maybe things that, like, you know, some species that I think are so unnecessary, like turtle, you know, that's my personal, when you see it, what the damage it does. But other things, if it's like a livelihood thing, we don't enter into that, whether you should or shouldn't, we just say, can we at least treat the animals in that system better? If we can, you know, if we can't, then there's no conversation to be had. Like if you're struggling to even catch them and then you have no resources anyway. So we meet you where you are, really. But with the average producer who wants to do things better, the conversation is very much around, let's remember these animals are sentient, let's handle them with care, let's try to slaughter them well. But yes, the concept is growing because there's a lot of funders now in the space who are trying to push that work harder. It was very small before, like 10 years ago, there was hardly anyone thinking of this. So it's still fairly new in many ways. And it very much piggybacks off animal welfare in the terrestrial space. So, you know, cows, pigs, chickens, and their welfare has been thought about a lot more for a lot longer. And a lot of the techniques that we use come from that world anyway.

HOST (Voiceover): ESR want to bridge the gap between animal welfare science and day-to-day practice. Wasseem emphasizes that the problem is not a lack of concern on the part of producers, but rather having the wrong tools or structures. This is a clip taken from a presentation that Wasseem gave, explaining this problem, and then how ESR make it easier for farmers to integrate fish welfare into their farming practices.

WASSEEM (Webinar Presentation Clip): So when we talk about assessing animal welfare in African aquaculture, the first thing to emphasize is that the problem is not a lack of concern or a lack of effort on the part of producers or farmers. We see it more as a structural mismatch. So many of the frameworks that exist to assess animal welfare, a lot of them are, you know, these are all tools that are designed, initially were designed for, you know, let's say salmon or trout farming in the global north. And, you know, what we try to do is adapt them to systems where there's much less standardization, less regulation. And, you know, you can see many farmers don't keep records, which makes it harder to use indicators that come with these welfare assessments. So when we apply assessment tools that were not designed for the reality of the Global South, we see two things happening. Either that these tools give us data that then doesn't end up being particularly useful for decision making, or the recommendations or pathway that can move the producer to improvement. If we look at this from a farmer's perspective, that can quickly feel like, you know, just another burden or something they have to do. They don't always see the clear benefit. So that's why in our work assessment isn't really the end in itself, it's just a starting point. What we really want to see is, you know, an assessment approach that helps farmers and farm managers, technicians, and so on, make better decisions and improve system performance over time. So many of the farmers that we work with, you know, for them, maybe the concept of animal welfare isn't explicitly named, or conceptualized, you know, they’re more familiar with things like survival, growth rates, disease outbreaks, the cost of feed. These are things that, you know, they are very familiar with and aware of, but they all obviously have links to feed – uh, to welfare, sorry - so we have to always make that link. So we don't see it as a separate objective. And then there's also this issue of trade-offs. So farmers obviously are faced with competing pressures, you know, stocking intensity versus growth, how much to feed versus water quality, handling stress versus, you know, the need to grade or sort the fish or even harvest them at the end. So without any clear guidance, animal welfare can lose out because the costs of making those changes take time to see, so the benefit isn't always immediately obvious. And then there's this lack of feedback. So farmers try something new, they'll maybe… we recommend adjusting feeding, reducing handling, carrying out more frequent water changes, but it takes some time to really see how that can improve welfare. So that's another thing that we have to work on a lot is how do we provide feedback on how those changes are helping. So if we take those changes together, we can then understand why good intentions aren't enough to improve outcomes. So despite those challenges, what we've actually seen is that if you approach it in the right way, you can implement sustainable change. So one of the key lessons that we've learned is that we have to use simple indicators and they have to be, things are observable. So producers or farmers can engage with concepts that they understand and recognize. So behaviour is something that we've had a lot of success with, and that's obviously a component of animal welfare. So behaviour during feeding, abnormal swimming behaviour during any part of the production cycle. Things like injury rates, looking at fish condition, these are much more easy to relate to than an abstract score or complex protocol. And then the second factor is how to integrate these welfare assessment frameworks or indicators into daily routines. So it has to be something that is not an extra task, but actually slots in quite nicely into current practices. So feeding, grading, routine checks at pond side or cage side. If assessment becomes part of what farmers already do, what we've seen is that uptake and consistency across time improved dramatically. So when welfare improvements align with outcomes that farmers truly care about, they're much more likely to be sustained in the long term. So what works is not just having sophisticated implementation or assessment frameworks, but it's really something that fits. So it has to fit to the context, it has to fit to the capacity of the farmers in practice, especially small-scale farmers that we're talking about, like maybe a couple of ponds in the back of their house, and it has to fit to their priorities as well. So practices that are good for welfare and good for the farmer, we tie them to things that farmers do every day. So not just special activities that are outside of that. So making a habit, let's say, for example, we've provided water quality monitoring equipment to farmers in Egypt and trained them on how to use it and then followed up with them. And over time, we found that they actually end up getting really interested. Oh, wow, if I do this, actually, this parameter changes. Oh, and I actually noticed a cycle that the fish, when we, at the end of the cycle, look different. And these are the kind of things that might motivate them to continue certain habits. So trends like mortality, behaviour, condition, these are things that farmers both recognize and care about. So if you look at all the elements together, they shift welfare from something that happens during a project to actually just something that happens as part of how the system operates.

If we want to improve on a welfare, we have to look at how we change decisions, behaviours, and priorities on a day-today basis. So in the context of African agriculture, where we see very diverse systems and where there's a lot of constraints farmers face, the success of an assessment approach, really how to judge that is not about how comprehensive and sophisticated it is, but whether it actually helps people act differently. And that's the behaviour change component of our work. So if we design assessment tools with that goal in mind, it can definitely be a powerful bridge between science and practice or policy even. If we don't have that in mind, it just becomes another layer of reporting and we don't find lasting impact, which is not what we're looking for at all. So that's the lens through which we approach this work.

HOST (Voiceover): And it isn't all about fish. Wasim originally struggled with the naming of the organization because he didn't want to label fishes as just seafood, but then realized that seafood can refer to things like seaweed as well. And this is a type of production that suits many communities, as well as, or even sometimes better than fish farming.

HOST: I did want to ask about seaweed farming as well, because that's something you guys, I don't know if you research it or you're encouraging it. I think that's some kind of a viable, you're offering it as a viable alternative.

WASSEEM: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So that's, I think one of our newest work streams that we have started to get into. I think, you know, the way I see it as the director of the organization, like where I, you know, strategy is part of my role. And I know that a lot of funders in our space, they're trying to, they want to reduce animal consumption or animal production, let's say. And, you know, they're one of the things I saw last year when I was in Tanzania and Zanzibar, which is a part of Tanzania of like the islands off the coast. We had spent some time there in 2023, and they invited us the next year to do an aquaculture strategy for the government, because based on my fin-fish aquaculture experience, they were like, oh, why don't you do something for us here? And that's how it developed. And the idea was to see…the government really wants to push for more fish farming based on the fact that that's what other countries are doing. So when we actually got into it and developed a strategy, we found that they're really, really well suited to seaweed. They're already doing it and they're doing a really good job of it. So why don't we do more? Why don't we focus on that as opposed to, you know, venturing off into fish farming, which is expensive. And in their case, it's not even going to be for food purposes. It's going to be for exporting. So it's going to be high value fish. It's probably going to be centralized. So not like low-income people get into that sector. It's not necessarily creating a lot of jobs. So why don't we stick with seaweed where there's a lot of opportunities to increase the value? The environment is very well suited for it. On many levels, it seemed to make sense to invest more effort. So that gave me an idea of, well, where else can that model be sort of pursued? So basically, the background to this is that the World Bank and other large multilateral development corporations, they're pushing for what they call blue economy, right? Blue economy, you know, all these countries need to exploit their blue economy resources. So that's fisheries, aquaculture, even oil and gas come under that and like natural renewable energy as well. And maritime transport is a blue economy thing and tourism. So all pillars of the blue economy. But for aquaculture, this is a big push for, oh, aquaculture is the future. These countries need to be farming more, exploiting what they have. Now, it's said it's just done in a kind of generic way, not specific to like, OK, which country should farm what and so on. So that's, I think, why Zanzibar was keen to do fish farming. But really, maybe they hadn't looked into it enough to realize that really seaweed is where the future might be for them. That was just our feeling based on the work that we did there with them. So that's how we got to seaweed. And then we hired a consultant, economic consultant, to see like, you know, when does it make sense for a country to invest more in seaweed? And when does it make more sense to look at fish farming? And that report's just been finalized. It's quite encouraging so far to see, you know, there are there's a lot of work needs to be done with seaweed to make sure that it's more high value, to make sure that the prices don't fluctuate as much. And it's not just fishing, ex-fishing communities that go into seaweed to supplement their income. Like, so it's not we wanted people to be leaving the fishing industry, but actually we're seeing that they're just doing it on top of their fishing work. So when there's not that much fish catch, they move to seaweed and then seaweed prices go up, they go to….so that's not really what we're looking for. But so we have to figure out a way or like a system that takes that into consideration. Let's say, you know, if we can increase the price of seaweed, less people will be leaving the sector, for example. So that's where we are. It's very new, very new, very new project.

HOST: Yeah, I thought that was interesting. You said that about a few projects that you worked on, that you're coming in at the start. That aquaculture is, I mean, I guess it's in the Global North we're kind of getting used to now, but it's starting to really blossom in the Global South. And so you guys want to get in and embed fish welfare. You've got an opportunity to kind of embed strategies that right from the start, rather than trying to have to fix the broken system once it's…

WASSEEM: Yeah. So, I mean, most of aquaculture growth globally happens in the Global South. And so if you look at producing countries, China's always number one. Doesn't matter in fishing and aquaculture and chicken production, you name it. China's in most sectors, China is just top, top, top, right? They just produce a lot at scale. So for fish, there's no doubt that they are the top country and the growth is fast there. But Africa is actually where growth is fastest currently. You know, there's a lot of money being thrown into Kenya, Ghana, Zambia, Uganda, even Egypt too. Egypt is number one in Africa. That's why we started there. But there's a really fast growth in many countries and there's a lot of scope for the continent to be one of the biggest producers. There's a lot of water resources and so on. So that's sort of our argument is that because there's fast growth, but it's still fairly small for now. Now's the time to think about how to do things well, instead of coming in later, as we see with like chicken, you know, for example, a bit late now to start. Well, there are efforts being done to ban high, fast growing breeds and things that are bad. But if we can stop it from the beginning, that might be good for the fish, good for the farmer. So these are the kind of things you want to maybe nip in the bud if you can. Yeah. Yeah. But I would say that the growth is very fast there. Definitely much faster than in the Global North because of, you know, governments pushing for it. And of course, you don't have the same level of regulatory red tape and so on.

HOST (Voiceover): Because of their reach across many different countries, collaboration is a large part of ESR's work. As Wasseem mentioned, he frequently attends conferences, one of which is the AVA Summit. AVA, the Animal and Vegan Advocacy Summit, convenes to advance systemic change for farmed animals around the world. It brings together advocates and organizations from all across the movement to celebrate their work and strengthen alliances, as well as share ideas and build communities. 2025 was the first year an AVA Summit was held in Africa.

HOST: I saw that you were at the Animal and Vegan Advocacy Summit in Kenya. How did you get on there?

WASSEEM: Yeah, so I think I've attended every single AVA since 2022. There used to be only US at the start, so it was DC. The next year was LA and then DC again LA. So I've been to most of them, or at least applied to most of them. That was my first time to really go and see what the movement looks like, the animal advocacy movement, and to meet funders and sort of big names and players in the space. And so this last year was the first time we did one in Africa. So that was Kenya was the first time in Africa. And because we're very active in Africa, we wanted to play a big role. So we were sponsors, low-level sponsors of events. We were a speaker, like me and my two colleagues. We had a three-person kind of shared presentation there, and we also, I facilitated a panel. No, yeah, it was a panel I facilitated. And then that was really good. So I would say the Kenyan one was very different to the US one. You know, the US one is very activist-y and more about the American reality, and it talked a lot about plant-based transition and so on. The one in Africa was very different because the context is quite different. We don't have the same dietary patterns. Actually, a lot of countries have naturally low levels of meat consumption for various reasons. So I felt the competition was quite different. And we were one of the few people talking about fish there, or aquatic animals. Now, this year, there'll be more, yeah. So this year, it's in Ghana. It's in July, I believe. And I just sent my application yesterday for... I submitted a presentation to speak there and see if they would get funding to present. Yeah. HOST: So, yeah, I wanted to talk to you about the environmental aspect of fish farms in lakes and that. Does that affect the... Is that part of your work, that you research the environmental aspect and advise people how to change what they're doing?

WASSEEM: So I guess in the case of cages, there is... Okay, first of all, aquaculture is so big. So we have either the Global North type salmon, which is farmed in a very different way, like high-tech and very sophisticated methods and so on. So I haven't worked much with salmon farmers, but there's definitely an environmental impact with the siting of salmon farms. So, you know, there's debris and sort of organic matter that's left around. The idea is that if you site them really well, the cages, the buildup of materials much lesser, like swept away by the tide. And that's less of an issue. But there's always going to be an impact. And there's fish that escape. So escapees is always going to be an issue in any kind of aquaculture. You have, you know, use of medicines that affect the environment around it.

And you have lice that are attracted to the salmon cages, for example, and then that affects the wild. There are groups that campaign against salmon farming in the UK and other places in Europe based on the environmental argument. So I would say the environment argument is stronger in the case of cages, also tilapia and other species where they're farmed in cages.

With ponds, yes, you're affecting the area around you, but it depends on the system you're using. So normally it's like these ponds all have water drainage that goes out and it's not really going to the environment per se. It's like a closed system where all the farms have their own drainage. Yeah, it's not great. It still does affect some wild animals, but it's not, they don't use the river directly, for example. They don't drain back into the river. But there are, of course, a number of concerns. And I was going to say the intensification of aquaculture is taking away from these. So there's something called RAS, which is a recirculating aquaculture system. So all that artificial, there's no pond or cage system. You have them in like tanks and doors or in a closed off place and everything is, so you have the water, there's water filters, there's temperatures control, you're testing all the parameters all the time. It's great from an environmental perspective because you're not affecting the environment and you're not, there's no fish escaping into the environment. Any medicines you use stay local because you have everything isolated, but obviously it's very unnatural and you have fish at much higher densities or you can have them at much, much higher densities. You need to have them at higher densities because it's much more expensive to farm that way and it wouldn't be profitable otherwise. So from a welfare perspective, it's probably not as good. There's a lot of discussion around that. I think it's really hard to say RAS is bad, but the gut instinct says that it's more intensive, more fish, less natural. From a behaviour perspective alone, it's likely to be not as good as the lower intensity systems. And there are other forms of intensive systems that I could maybe touch upon, like is it in pond raceway system. So it's in the pond, but it kind of keeps the fish in a smaller area and just cleans the water in a way and it kind of closes off from the environment around it. So you're not taking water from outside, you're just keeping the water inside and cleaning it internally. That's still an intensive form of aquaculture though. So yeah, just to your question, there are definitely concerns there.

HOST: So I think I got this from your website. You're just talking about coastal communities, fish farms, that their food is sold or exported to feed to other farms. So instead of feeding themselves with the fish they're growing, the fish is being exported and that's kind of damaging the communities. Do you want to speak to that?

WASSEEM: You're talking about like the West African fisheries actually. So it's like either local boats that are catching them or European and other countries fishing fleets that go to these areas because they buy the rights to fish from them and then they catch the fish there. But the fish go straight into fish feed and it goes to feed salmon and sea bass and sea bream. So that's a big issue that many organizations have campaigned about because it's affecting food security in those countries as food that should be feeding them but instead it's going into fish feed for the North. Is that what you're referring to?

HOST: Yeah, I was just curious myself because I was listening to you on some podcast as well and you were talking about all the different ocean areas. They're all divided up into these zones.

WASSEEM: Yeah absolutely. They're called the fishing management areas and actually in theory, I don't know in practice if it's always there, but any caught fish, if you look at a tin of canned tuna, it should say at the back of it. Most times when I've tested it, I've always found it will say which fishing area was caught in like GSA - geographical sub areas - what that means. It'll tell you where it was caught basically. And based on that, you can know which RFMO, which regional fisheries management organization was responsible for managing the stocks in that area. Because it's always multi-country, right? So countries fight over how much they can catch in each area and so on. So it has to be managed in a third-party kind of way. So that's something I think the UN does quite well. The UN gets criticized a lot but in terms of managing resources or helping countries manage their resources more efficiently, they at least give a framework.

HOST: Do you…? So I know you said that you weren't a great fit or you weren't comfortable in industry. Do you really like what you're doing now? Is it what you kind of, when you started off, when you founded this company, is it going in the direction that you'd hoped?

WASSEEM: Yeah, so I mean, I don't think I've ever worked as much in my life as I do now. You know, I’m almost always working. You can ask my wife and my children who just, I'm always working. But you know, and I don't even, it's not that, I actually take very little salary from the organization so that it can grow. Like I try to sacrifice my own salary so that we can invest in things and have more impact and make something, you know, bigger and that would then, you know, sort of sustain itself, let's say. Because the operational side of non-profits is always the part that no one really wants to fund. They want to give you money for projects but then no one really wants to fund your core costs. And so for now the core costs are coming from my own sacrifices basically and I hope to find a solution soon where we can transition away from that. But I mean, all of that is to say that passion is what drives me  personally, you know, and belief that I can build something really exciting and work in an area that is really important and I can see every day that it's, like I believe in what I'm doing and I think that we're making a difference and so on. I think we can do a lot of great things and that's what drives me. But yeah, it's difficult. And of course, like, there's no one to tell me what to do (laughing). I actually never thought I'd be a founder or a director. I didn't think as a natural leader. I kind of just stumbled into this because of one small project I was doing that kind of grew into something bigger. But yeah, I think when you love what you're doing, you just do it anyway, you know. So I don't procrastinate on tasks. I'm always looking for a chance to catch up on things because I actually really, really want to see things get done, you know. And then that just sort of, one thing leads to another, you know. Like, I'm currently working on, like, four book chapters somehow. I've been invited to that, you know. I get invited to give talks in places. I just kind of came out of nowhere a lot of this stuff and, you know, I love podcasts and things like this where you get to talk about your work and your journey and so on.

HOST: You do describe yourself as opportunistic, so it does seem like any opportunity that comes your way, you jump on it.

WASSEEM: A bit, yes, definitely. No, I mean, I don't have a bit, very much so. I think it's a good thing. I mean, it has brought me a lot, but I can see how it can also be, you know, not... So sometimes it's good to be strategic, you know. I said, okay, you know, I'll work on this. I'll become an expert in this and I'll say no to everything else. But so Zanzibar, when they asked us to do a strategy, I thought, oh, well, let's see where this goes. And, you know, that led to the seaweed initiative that we have now. And let's see where that goes. That's kind of my approach, but, you know, at least for my ADHD type brain, I think that keeps it exciting and interesting and keeps things different. Yeah.

HOST: That's wonderful what you said about how you don't procrastinate, that you really are, you know, you want to get on with things, you want to be working on stuff. That's so different from a lot of people's work where they're just like, oh, do I have to do this?

WASSEEM: I mean, obviously there's tasks I don't enjoy, right? I've helped with some things, but I'm saying like, I rarely take complete days off because I don't want things to pile up and I really don't want things to slow down. So I'm usually the one making things keep going.

So I have to follow up with my team on the ground and various colleagues. And I don't want to be the bottleneck in things as well. So that's why keep going. And the momentum creates more momentum.

HOST: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. So when you said you're writing, I don't know if you're writing an academic book, are you writing a book yourself or are you writing chapters for? Both. I was given a book contract last year by Taylor and Francis. I've only, I've just about wrapped that up actually. So that's a 200 page, should be around £50 pounds. More academic, but it's kind of a manual on like how to improve animal welfare and aquaculture. So that's exciting. It'll be the first book ever, but then book chapters are various things as well. There’s one on like, animal law, it’s a compendium, they called it on global animal, ah, global law as it relates to aquaculture. So we did a chapter for Egypt and there's all a bunch. Another one, another book is about business ethics and how fish are treated as commodities. So I wrote that chapter for another book completely. That one's a bit out of my comfort zone, to be honest. There's this one, very similar one to the one I'm writing. They are writing one and they asked me to write a chapter in theirs. Mine is one author, but theirs is like multi-author chapters.

HOST: And you guys have a kids book as well, don't you? A sort of a.

WASSEEM: Yeah, I forgot about that. Yeah. So that one came out last year. That's an idea I had a few years ago with my cousin when I said to her like, you know, so we want to, we were trying to create merchandise for people to buy as a way of like raising money. And she said, why don't you make a book? I don't know. I mean, I don't remember if she said activity book or not. She did say activity book with all kinds of things around the ocean and fish and stuff. And I thought that's an exciting idea. That's a nice idea. And I gave it to one of my colleagues and we thought about it more and that ended up being an activity book for kids and a colouring book with like lots of nice pictures and information about, you know, how fish are caught and the kind of welfare concerns that are associated with every type of fishing activity. But in a way that's accessible for kids, not like a high level technical or anything, but it's just a bit fun, really. And it can be entry point for conversations. So we have a lot of educational people that reach out and say, oh, we want to use that in our school. Some of the materials we have like teacher, what are they called? Like these supplementary materials for teachers. We have that.

HOST: Like teaching aids kind of thing. Yeah, that's great.

WASSEEM: I'm not the first author on that. So it's my colleague Anne-Marie who led on that. It was my idea and sort of I managed the project, but she very much wrote the book and commissioned the illustrator for the drawings.

HOST: Sometimes it can be hard to distill your ideas when you know so much, when you're so educated and you have so much experience to kind of simplify that. It must be hard sometimes to go from really high expertise talking at, like you say, at a meeting or something and then to take it down to what level are you at that I can talk to you about.

WASSEEM: But I will say this, that I think most of our work kind of lends itself to, which is because this is a part of my field that I never liked. So when I go to aquaculture conferences, the industry ones, people are presenting on like, you know, you know, we've improved how this molecule performs in this pharmaceutical compound that affects fish in this way. And like I'm much more macro. So like, okay, what we're doing about fish health or welfare or in the systems. So I get very bored looking at, you know, tiny things because it feels very incremental. But of course it's important, you know? But you're right. The audience determines what you can do and say. But when I tell people I work with fish, I don't usually say aquaculture because not everyone understands what it is I say, you know, fish that are caught for food or like food fish. And then they say, oh, you know, like in fisheries, no, not fisheries, aquaculture and explain what aquaculture is. And I find it interesting. Yeah. I guess what I would say is that we, our aim and our message is to, you know, raise awareness about the plight of fish in food systems, not just fish. We say fish, but it's really all aquatic animals, you know, that a lot of times they're not given a basic treatment even. And a lot of people don't think of them as sentient. So our work is, you know, raising that awareness around that and but working with producers very much and with industry players and the governments to improve that. So instead of, you know, attacking the industry, you want to work with them to make it better. But people should inform themselves, you know, no matter your dietary choices, where's your fish coming from? And is it wild caught? Is it farmed? You know, is it coming from sustainable sources? Can we look for certifications to, you know, to make sure it's at least a bit better in theory? We haven't talked about certification at all in this call, but that is a big part of our work. We work with certifiers.

HOST: I was going to say, do you do you have a certification or do you work with people who have or how does that work?

WASSEEM: So because we work with small scale producers in places where, you know, they're not exporting and there's no marketing fish hole, they're not as interested as having a certification. They couldn't afford it anyway. Not the big, big schemes. But as we've grown, we've started to work with some of the bigger producers who are more interested in that. So we just actually got an email yesterday from the Aquaculture Stewardship Council where to tell us that we've been approved to be implementers of their program so we can enroll farmers that we work with into their program. And it's like kind of a – there’s a word for - it's like a pathway that gets the farmers who are not close to being certification ready to slowly build them up on that ramp and like improve their practices, get documentation places and so on so that they can eventually be certified. So that's exciting. We'll start to get more into the certification space. And I was just going to say that in other places, yeah, so I used to work for ASC myself a couple of five years ago. I did some contracting or consulting work for them on welfare. They're a very good certifier and I would be very confident buying a seafood product that has their label because I know it's very hard to obtain their certification. Or it's just criticism, but you know, it's definitely a step in the right direction. Yeah.

HOST: Okay, great. I think I'll wrap it up there and let you get on to your next whatever you're next.

HOST (Voiceover): As you can hear, the work of ESR is dynamic and ever-evolving. You can find more details about their success stories and their impact at ethicalseafoodresearch.org. I really want to thank Wasseem for taking the time to explain some of the challenges they face and solutions they are implementing. I learned a lot and I hope you did too.

That's it for now. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.