Eco Extremists Target Grocery Stores in Misguided Effort

June 17, 2008 Washington, D.C. Greenpeace’s efforts to disrupt American seafood sales are underway. With the release of a new and flawed report on seafood sustainability the eco extremist group began targeting U.S. grocery stores in an effort to force them to remove half of all seafood from sale. The campaign includes a ranking of grocery stores according to Greenpeaces sustainability standards.

Consumers should know that the retailer rankings presented in this report have no credibility, said John Connelly, National Fisheries Institute (NFI) President. The non-science based standards by which Greenpeace came to its conclusions highlight the weaknesses in this document and undermine its own efforts.

Ignoring the hard work stores have done to ensure the seafood products they offer are sustainable the report says, most U.S. supermarkets continue to purchase seafood with little consideration for the health of fish stocks they sell and even less concern for how seafood was caught, or for the effects on the wider marine environment.

Greenpeace is painting retailers and the entire seafood industry with a very broad and misleading brush as part if this ill conceived strategy to pressure stores, said Connelly. This campaign is based on ideology and hysteria not facts.

Greenpeace most recently carried out the same campaign in Europe. The next step, following the rankings, was a dangerous and illegal campaign of direct action against stores that refused to give in to their unreasonable demands.

Greenpeaces actions in Europe were vandalism not activism, plain and simple. If we see that type of behavior here it willfurther marginalize this already fringe group and serve only to detract from ongoing and substantive sustainability discussions.

For more than 60 years, the National Fisheries Institute (NFI) and its members have provided American families with the variety of sustainable seafood essential to a healthy diet. For more information visit: www.AboutSeafood.com.

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Contact Information

Gavin Gibbons
(703) 752-8891
ggibbons@nfi.org