Reeling in the Catch: Modelling the Dynamics of Market Fraud Within the Seafood Supply Chain
Seafood is a major global commodity and a critical source of income, nutrition, and livelihood worldwide. Yet high demand, opaque supply chains, and lax labelling regulations incentivize opportunistic fishers, wholesalers, and retailers to commit seafood fraud. This can include mislabelling, substituting, and/or adulterating seafood products. The effects of seafood fraud create a negative consumer experience and erodes trust in supply chain management, making it difficult for consumers to make informed choices, access accurate information within the industry, and encourages harvesters to engage in illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.
Tracking when and where product fraud is occurring is challenging due to the many players in the seafood supply chain and the lackof provenance documentation. Detecting seafood fraud often requires leveraging of sophisticated molecular identification tools like DNA barcoding technology. As a result, fraudulent agents are often able to engage and commit fraud before it is discovered. Ultimately, there’s a greater need to better understand and appreciate the dynamics among key players within the seafood supply chain.
From Sea to Solutions
Over the summer, Undergraduate Research Assistantship (URA) and fourth-year Computer Science student Richard Cui teamed up with Dr. Jarrett Phillips and Dr. Daniel Gillis from the School of Computer Science, along with Dr. Michael Yodzis and Dr. Robert Hanner from the Department of Integrative Biology, to build a sophisticated mathematical model of seafood fraud within the supply chain to better understand the interactions occurring at three levels: seafood stock, wholesalers, and consumers who have a delayed awareness of fraud.
This work builds on earlier research from the Centre for Ecosystem Management at the University of Guelph. The model links two subsystems: a bioeconomic subsystem and a behavioural subsystem. The bioeconomic system represents interactions between harvesters’ effort and the depletable seafood resource, capturing the influence of fraudsters in the supply chain who provide harvesters with an incentive to engage in destructive IUU fishing practices for short term profit at the expense of ecological health. The behavioural subsystem represents the decision of wholesalers on whether to engage in fraud, and the ability of consumers to discover this fraud and respond by exiting the market.
In the full model, these systems are coupled: fraud levels from the behavioral subsystem directly influence whether harvesting effort in the bioeconomic subsystem remains sustainable, while fraudulent wholesalers and IUU harvesters exploit consumer misperception to earn higher profit margins than honest wholesalers and harvesters, reinforcing fraud incentives in the short term.
“As consumers’ perception of seafood fraud grows and their awareness of it spreads, public pressure for a change in regulations and hopefully, fraud prevention is achievable,” says Cui, who helped develop the model during his URA with the goal of positioning consumers to better understand seafood fraud and its implications.
Just Keep Swimming
The team looks to continue developing their understanding of the model and to perform further analysis. These insights will be critical in highlighting real-world advocacy. Future directions for the model include incorporating mechanisms for regulatory changes, testing how different interventions affect fraud levels, and comparing model output with empirical data. These extensions will enable actionable forecasting, such as predicting vulnerable seafood populations based on past fraud trends and supply-chain conditions.
The model is freely accessible via Google Colab, with Python-based tools for sensitivity analysis, stability testing, and visualization.