Global Seafood Alliance Best Aquaculture Practice standards accused

76 environmental, community, and animal welfare groups, including NOFF, expose the farce that is the Global Seafood Alliance's Best Aquaculture Practice standards, and conclude, with evidence, that the standard is little more than an industry-established and dominated marketing scheme that functions to protect the salmon farming industry.

The first and last public comment period held for BAP's Salmon Farm Standard was Issue 1 in 2011. Despite having thirteen years to move towards a more scientifically robust standard, the BAP standard still has no meaningful metric limits or performance expectations for certified farms on critical environmental impacts such as sea lice, disease, parasiticides, antibiotics, dissolved oxygen, and endangered, threatened and protected species.

The BAP standard is nothing more than a checkbox exercise of confirming a company's legal obligations, status quo farming practices and management plans.

This has resulted in farms being certified and fish sold as "environmentally responsible" when, in reality, scientific evidence demonstrates such farms are contributing to environmental degradation of sensitive habitats.

• Due to a lack of transparency by the BAP certification, it is impossible to know whether the BAP label has been removed from any products from its certified farms. 
• BAP audits are conducted behind closed doors with no civil society stakeholder consultation and no published audit reports to demonstrate a farm's compliance with BAP standards. 
• BAP farms linked with adverse environmental impacts have gone on to sell product to unsuspecting consumers with misleading claims of "best practice" and "environmentally responsible".

BAP is little more than an industry-established and dominated marketing scheme that functions to protect the salmon farming industry. Salmon Farm Standard 3.0 confirms that BAP is content with setting a very low bar for farms to qualify for certification and continuing the greenwashing of unsustainable practices.