Rauch Foundation
Our work with the Rauch Foundation, a New York-based non-profit family foundation, and Katheti, a non-profit cultural and education centre based on the island of Poros, involves of a campaign to protest against the mass expansion of fish farms on Poros. (Fish farming is a kay part of aquaculture - the fastest growing sector of agriculture in the world - billed as 'the green solution' to feed protein to the world's growing population. However, its impact is being increasingly understood around the world.)
Plans by the Greek government to expand industrial fish farms on Poros, a tiny island on the Saronic Gulf, would see 1/4 of the island’s beautiful coastline and land mass taken over by fish farms. This would have devastating ecological and economic consequences for the island’s inhabitants - 80% of whom work in the tourism industry.
We created press assets to launch #SavePoros on World Oceans Day 2023, communicating the issues to audiences around the globe. Campaign assets included a documentary produced by investigative journalist, Francesco de Augustinis, as well as infographics distributed to the press and used on social media.
As the campaign launched, we secured top tier
Global and European broadcast news coverage
Fay Orfanidou, Executive Director of Katheti, was interviewed on the BBC World News programme, World Business Report, which airs at breakfast time in Europe and has a weekly, global audience of over 100,000,000. We also secured an article in Euronews online which features a special edit of Francesco's documentary and detailed the many threats to Poros. Other publications which have published the story include France24 and Arab News en Français.
The same issue is affecting communities around the world. In February 2024, the Financial Times published an-depth article entitled, 'The Hidden Cost of your Supermarket Salmon' which detailed widespread social and environmental impacts of fish farming, including the illogical and unfair removal of millions of tonnes of perfectly edible small fish from West African communities to make fishmeal for salmon to feed consumers in Europe. These very communities rely on such small fish for nutrition, let alone their livelihoods.
This is a pattern being seen around the world. Indeed, a forthcoming documentary by Francesco DeAugustinis investigates the issues at play by filming communities on 3 continents over 3 years, as reported in Italy's Corriere della Serra newspaper.
If you're interested in following this story, please find out more via the Katheti website, or sign the petition to stop this entirely inappropriate plan from going ahead, and help #SavePoros.
