Specifications include, but are not limited to: Aquatic and marine foods (e.g., edible fish, invertebrates, and algae harvested from inland and marine waters) are among the most globalized commodities, with between 30-40% of wild-caught fish traded internationally. In the United States alone, $5 billion worth of seafood is exported annually, while 62-65% of the seafood consumed nationally is imported. The globalization of seafood has, in many cases, negatively impacted community-based fisheries, contributing to the consolidation of fishing fleets, loss of post-harvest processing jobs and infrastructure, competition with cheap imported seafood, volatility in markets, vulnerabilities in supply chains, and traceability issues, among other challenges. In response, a multitude of recent policy initiatives call for efforts to strengthen local and regional seafood systems, including harvest, processing, distribution, marketing, and consumption. In this project, we aim to understand what the benefits (and shortcomings1 ) of accessing local and regional seafood systems are, who is benefitting (both past and present), how (i.e., through which mechanisms), and the possibilities for enhancing access for more equitable seafood systems and greater food sovereignty. Here we define access as the ability to benefit from a ‘thing,’ typically resources, but access can also relate to different goods or opportunities throughout the food system, including job opportunities in the sector or to seafood itself. Access is mediated by a variety of mechanisms in different contexts (e.g., formal rights, customary rights, capital, markets, technology, knowledge, authority, and social relations) that together shape who is able to take advantage of the benefits of aquatic resources, the marine environment, employment in the seafood sector, and the seafood ultimately produced. This project will explore the mechanisms mediating seafood access in local and regional seafood systems in the U.S. from a whole food systems approach. While conventionally, fish have been understood as resources managed to maximize economic efficiency in production, increasingly, fish are valued as food, understood as part of wider food systems. A food systems approach brings social and environmental relations beyond the production node (e.g., harvesting) into view, implicating a wider set of actors, food system activities, and outcomes as relevant to fisheries decision-making. By taking a food systems approach, this project aims to understand access issues throughout the food system, including in seafood production, provisioning (processing marketing, trade, logistics), consumption, and food loss and waste.
