Seaspiracy and Seafood Souq discuss how we can save our oceans
We were delighted to be invited to speak at the Sharjah Entrepreneurship Festival in a panel discussion/fireside chat titled ‘Making change happen’, with Ali Tabrizi, director of one of Netflix’s top 10 most watched film/documentary, Seaspiracy and Ibrahim Zu’bi the Chief Sustainability Officer for Majid Al Futtaim-Holding.
Sharjah Entrepreneurship Festival is the region’s largest gathering of entrepreneurs, innovators and change-makers, aiming to provide a platform for local and regional success stories and encouraging the youth to envision themselves as the future leaders of impactful change.
Seafood Souq’s mission is to revolutionize the seafood industry through digitisation; providing transparency for a notoriously opaque industry in order to shape the future of our oceans. Seafood Souq operates a digital ecosystem for seafood trade that provides full traceability from sea to serving giving business buyers and end consumers the visibility to choose, support and consume responsibly sourced seafood.
Ali Tabrizi is a British filmmaker who directed Seaspiracy, the groundbreaking Netflix Original documentary which sought to expose the environmental impact of fishing, the film examines various human impacts on marine life and advocates for ending fish consumption.
Having these open conversations with other change-makers that share the same passion and goal to save our oceans is of huge importance to Seafood Souq, even though our approaches to this issue differs, we firmly believe that every drop in the ocean counts in working towards protecting our oceans and its marine life.
Scroll down to read some of the highlights from this insightful conversation.
Left to right: Sean Dennis (Seafood Souq) Ibrahim Zu’bi (Majid Al Futtaim-Holding), Ali Tabrizi (Seaspiracy) Inside Sharjah Expo Centre’s main stage
Customers can be change-makers themselves
It has been great to see in the past five to ten years a change in the conscious behavior of the end consumer… we as consumers are the most powerful driving force behind change of the business operators
Sean Dennis — Seafood Souq’s CEO and Co-founder
Transparency drives ethical choices
I believe we need to challenge the notion of sustainability and those who claim to be a voice of the ocean. I think we need to incorporate ethics into our decision making, and have ethics be the lighthouse which guides us away from those destructive rocks….ethics comes down to the heart and distinguishing right choices from wrong choices, sustainability becomes a number game sometimes and I worry that it will end up hiding the suffering and destruction that happens to marine life.
Ali Tabrizi — Filmmaker and Director of Seaspiracy
In the seafood industry, we as consumers weren’t equipped with the information or ability to make decisions that match our values as customers, which is why we created SFS Trace a tech product that brings full supply chain traceability to the end consumer. We are enabling consumers to make ethical choices with our QR code displayed on package labelling and menus bringing the power back to the hand of the consumer and the ethical business buyers.
Sean Dennis — Seafood Souq
Two strategies, one shared goal
Philosophically I think we approach things differently, but I also applaud your work as well, I think my approach is really one of reduction and elimination of marine life in our diets, moving towards more plant based diets overall and asking governments to step in and get the political will to protect the ocean
Ali Tabrizi — Seaspiracy
Working with governments, agencies, large companies, all the way down to consumers, I want to address the entire seafood industry and whether that ends with us not eating fish anymore, whether we are able to get there one day, we’ll see…but in the meantime the actions we can take now is something that I am a massive advocate for
Sean Dennis — Seafood Souq
Left to right: Sean Dennis (Seafood Souq), Ali Tabrizi (Seaspiracy), Sophie Hunter-James (Seafood Souq)
Thank you to Najla Al Midfa CEO at Sharjah Entrepreneurship Center (Sheraa), Sharjah Entrepreneurship Festival and Entrepreneur Middle East for inviting us to be a part of this impactful event, and Ibrahim Zu’bi and Ali Tabrizi for sharing an insightful and educational conversation with us on this panel; individually we are one drop together we are the ocean.
Want to watch the full discussion? Head over to our Instagram here