ADDRESSING LABOUR ISSUES IN THE SOUTHEAST ASIAN SEAFOOD SUPPLY CHAIN  

Food safety, social responsibility, animal welfare, environmental sustainability and traceability are the core of responsible shrimp trade.  Metrics and indicators exist for food safety, animal welfare, environmental impact and traceability. Social compliance in the seafood supply chain is rapidly emerging and new. 'Nowadays there is limited experience and research in social compliance in the seafood supply chain. To foster improvement in social, labor and human rights compliance within the seafood supply chain, social benchmarking should be developed to fit aquaculture farms and boats' needs. This means that relevant indicators must be identified and accordingly, new tools for social monitoring would be designed.

The digital social monitoring expert group aims at exploring digital social monitoring solutions to foster social and labor improvement in the seafood supply chain. The expert group is dedicated toward doing that by:

-      Scoping for business implementation and civil society relevance

-      Identify social performance indicators and matching metrics

-      Deploying on-site digital monitoring systems as information source

-      Continuous risk assessment to debug the digital monitoring system

-      Co-creation process involving synergy and support

Currently there are 12 metric categories being developed

-      Workers' representation

-      Grievance Mechanism

-      Child Labour

-      Fair recruitment

-      Fair remuneration

-      Decent working hours

-      Non-discrimination and Gender issues

-      Health & Safety

-      Fair Disciplinary procedures

-      Community development

-      Freedom of Movement

-      Forced Labour

The metrics a expected to link environmental monitoring and social risk to compliance while also creating room for corporate social responsibility that engenders an in-depth evaluation of issues with surrounding communities concerning resource use