Contributing to fisheries sustainability by making the best possible use of their resources: the BEFAIR initiative

The global harvesting of marine products has increased from around 17 million tons in the 1950s to a current average amount of 85 million tons. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that an annual average of 27 million tons of non-targeted species are caught and thrown back into the sea, what means that near third of the fish volume captured every year is wasted. This in itself represents a purposeless waste of valuable living resources, but in addition, the large amounts of organic waste thrown into the sea may produce severe adverse effects on the ecological equilibrium of marine communities.In this context, the BEFAIR initiative1 (www.befairproject.com) -co-founded under the LIFE Environment Program of the European Union- was devised in the intention to contribute to a responsible and sustainable management of fisheries by making the best possible use of the captured resources avoiding its waste.This paper discusses the main actions taken in the project, which in the purpose of reducing the costs associated to the implementation of that so-called zero-discard and zero-waste policy, were directed to the development and implementation of integral management and novel processing practices. The aim of these actions is to upgrade captured resources (by-catch and wastes produced by fish processing) and thus to obtain added value products of interest in the food industry.