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Bas Geerts of UTZ Certified will be the new Director of Standards for the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), the independent entity responsible for managing the global standards developed by the Aquaculture Dialogues, the ASC Supervisory Board announced today.
The hiring of Geerts marks the end of the development phase of the ASC, overseen by Dr. Philip Smith, and the beginning of the operational phase. Geerts, who will begin working for the ASC on May 1st, is currently the manager of traceability services and new business developer at UTZ Certified, a worldwide certification body for coffee, tea and cocoa. Prior to his career at UTZ Certified, he was the new business developer at the Netherlands office of World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
The ASC also announced today that the first four sets of standards developed by the Aquaculture Dialogues, a series of multi-stakeholder roundtables coordinated by WWF, will be handed over to the ASC by the groups that managed the Dialogue roundtables.
This will occur at the 2011 European Seafood Exposition on May 3.
The standards are for farmed tilapia, pangasius, abalone and bivalves (clams, oysters, mussels and scallops). They were developed with input from almost 1,000 farmers, NGOs, scientists and others over the past few years. The timeline for certifying against the standards, as well as the timeline for launching the ASC label, will be announced at the ESE as well.
The ASC’s Supervisory Board is in the midst of selecting a CEO for the organisation. In the meantime, Dr. Esther Luiten, former co-director of the North Sea Foundation and the current program manager for aquaculture at IDH, will act as managing director of the ASC. In this interim period, Luiten has stepped down from her post at IDH, which helps fund the ASC. She is working now together with Geerts to gear up the ASC under the supervision of the ASC Supervisory Board.
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