If a fish farmer in southern Africa wants to access international seafood markets, what steps do they need to take? This question is the starting point for a fascinating study by Imani Development aimed at boosting trout exports from Lesotho. It is also the start of a journey for two farms that committed to the international aquaculture standards of Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) and to making a host of improvements to reach full compliance.

Imani’s case study shows that the driver for change is market access, and it logs the improvements made over time to gain this access. As such, it constitutes a valuable, independent assessment of how certification standards can act as an instrument of change long before an auditor even sets foot on a farm.

Baselines

Voluntary certification programs like BAP are sometimes unjustly criticized for certifying the status quo, so it is important to provide evidence from field studies to demonstrate positive change on the water. The Imani study does this job very effectively by setting baselines and by measuring improvements against them.

In the normal course of events, few people have time to establish baselines, and no systematic records of the situation are kept before a farm gets certified. Hence, to an uninformed outsider, attaining certification may appear merely as a box-ticking exercise with an auditor signing off compliance on the day of the audit. This would ignore the months of hard work undertaken in advance. Farmers, wisely enough, will not undergo the expense of an audit until

they know they are likely to pass – they make improvements, and they are not content with the status quo.

Progress

The careful logging of baselines and progress in the Imani report lends itself to charting how farms improve. BAP standards comprise sets of compliance clauses divided into five key areas: food safety, social accountability, environmental responsibility, animal health and welfare and traceability. These key areas are the BAP pillars of responsible aquaculture, and they are plotted in the figures below for both farms in the study.

The triple impact of standards: Change before, during and after certification

BAP (and its sister for wild seafood BSP, Best Seafood Practices) is keen to maximize positive change and to better understand the mechanisms for inducing change. The Imani study shows how certification can drive improvements before certification and it thus helps to fill an important gap in our understanding. To understand change during and after the certification process, BAP has collaborated with other independent researchers (e.g., Michael Tlusty of the University of Massachusetts-Boston and Froukje Kruijssen of The Tropical Institute in the Netherlands).

The work by Michael Tlusty, through the systematic analysis of audit reports, has mainly focused on assessing improvements that are made between the initial audit and the granting of certification following corrective actions (i.e., those actions taken by the farm in response to any