Mowi Chile farm leads the way with remote BAP certification
A Mowi salmon farm in Chile has become the first in the world to earn Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) certification by remote assessment.
Strict travel restrictions imposed to prevent the spread of Covid-19 to fish farming areas meant an on-site assessment couldn’t be carried out for the farm at Isla García in the Aysén region.
To solve the problem, Mowi asked BAP if it could develop a remote auditing policy instead.
Crisis creates opportunity
Álvaro Pérez, Mowi Chile’s licences and environment manager, said: “Moments of crisis create opportunities to do things differently and we believe that innovation using technology to perform audits remotely opens a way to continue advancing in the sustainability and efficiency of our company.”
The executive said he hoped that after the pandemic the certification process will continue to be done this way, “thus maintaining our commitment to customers and communities, and continuing to offer the world quality food, produced in a sustainable way”.
Great commitment
Jorge Ríos, local manager of the third-party assessor Control Union, said: “This project was a pilot plan for remote audits of BAP developed in an exceptional way due to the Covid-19 pandemic and it is the first certification of this class that takes place in the world.
“It was a completely new experience that required great commitment from the Control Union team, from BAP and from Mowi Chile. The first thing included in the process was an exhaustive document review; meetings with the people of Mowi using the Teams [video conferencing] platform and the subsequent validation of the entire process by BAP.”
