We all have moments that change the way we see the world. When I was 14, Randy Clegg asked me if I wanted to see The Clash. That was one. Another, admittedly less pose-worthy, came in 1994 when I read a book about cod.
The book that stayed with me all these years is Fishing for Truth by Alan Finlayson. At first glance, it is a study of how scientists assessed the Northern Cod stock off Newfoundland. In reality, it is a tragic story about a society staring at a catastrophe it was creating, and failing to see it. Not because the data was missing, but because of who was doing the looking.
The Northern Cod had fed people for five hundred years. Then, in 1977, Canada extended its fisheries jurisdiction to 200 nautical miles, gaining control of the Grand Banks. Large fishing companies expanded domestic harvesting capacity with new trawlers and processing plants, backed by government subsidies to industrialize the fishery. Fifteen years later, the Northern Cod was virtually gone from overfishing. Tens of thousands of people lost their livelihoods. The scientists setting annual fishing quotas were measuring the health of the cod stock the whole time. And yet the fishery collapsed.
The local inshore fishers in Newfoundland saw the destruction of the Northern Cod plainly, each year pulling up emptier and emptier nets. The truth was right there, but it escaped the people whose job was to understand the crisis. In Fishing for Truth, Finlayson argues that the science assessing cod was shaped, often unconsciously, by the interests that profited from catching fish, not protecting them. No single person intentionally lied. It was subtler and more unsettling. He showed that knowledge itself, even hard scientific knowledge, is not simply discovered. It is constructed by people, and people are shaped by incentives. The Department of Fisheries had a mandate to keep the fishery open. Political and economic pressure rewarded optimism and punished alarm. Every one of those pressures nudged the interpretation of the data in the same direction: the cod stock is fine, the fishing can continue.
The future is safe.
No single nudge was a lie. But add them up, year after year, and the system produced a distorted version of truth that served the wrong people, right up until the fish were gone.
We tend to think of truth as something fixed, waiting to be found, and of suppliers as either honest enough to report the truth or dishonest enough to bury it. That is not how it works in complex supply chains. Someone decides what gets measured, how, by whom, and which numbers count. Whoever controls the production of supplier data shapes not only the truth about that supplier, but the targets it pursues.
In Fishing for Truth, the misinformation was structural. It was built into the data production. Try applying that idea to everything you buy. Your suppliers are producing data about their own consequences right now. The carbon number. The labour audit. The safety record. Left alone, unaudited suppliers will manage the truth to optimize their own profit, shaping what gets measured and disclosed.
Certification systems, like the one run by the Marine Stewardship Council, are important. We will dive into them later. For now, the facts tell us that more needs to be done. A third of the world's fish stocks are being depleted faster than they recover. The ocean is warming, acidifying, and losing oxygen. And over 128,000 fishers are trapped in forced labour on fishing vessels worldwide. If you eat fish, there is a very good chance your money is funding at least one of those destructive outcomes.
A lot has happened since Fishing for Truth was published. The Northern Cod survived. After a 32-year moratorium, the stock is recovering. A careful fishery has reopened. The near-total destruction of a five-hundred-year-old resource and the loss of 30,000 livelihoods carry hard lessons.
The most enduring lesson is the one about truth. And trust. Our suppliers will go to almost any length to make a profit. It does not make them bad. It's just their nature. The best way to ensure we can trust our suppliers is to make truth a condition of enforceable contracts, with real consequences for causing harm.
There are a thousand other collapses underway right now in the world's supply chains, many resembling the ecological crisis of the Northern Cod. Others are social or cultural. Each is a function of suppliers chasing profits that depend on your money. And each supplier can be made to compete for your money on terms you set.
If you want to start your own journey toward accountable supply chains, visit Supplierism.com to see how we are building a free app to make it possible.
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