Jim Cannon

Jim Cannon is CEO and founder of Sustainable Fisheries Partnership. He has worked on fishery, forestry, and conservation issues with diverse communities in Asia, Europe, and the Americas for more than three decades.

Jim was a pioneer in working with companies to drive change through their seafood supply chains, beginning with McDonald’s in 2002 and Walmart in 2004. In 2006, Jim founded SFP to scale up the impact of these fisheries improvement efforts. Today, the model for fisheries conservation that Jim and the SFP team created has become the standard approach to seafood sustainability among seafood companies worldwide.

Before starting SFP, Jim edited the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s World Review of Marine Fisheries in the late 1990s. He worked at Conservation International from 1997 to 2006, where he headed the economics program and then the policy center. He served on
the Marine Stewardship Council’s (MSC’s) Technical Advisory Board from 2005 to 2008 and was named Intrafish’s “Person of the Year” in 2009. He studied ecology at Cambridge University and renewable resources management and fisheries economics at Imperial College, London.

Jim is passionate about seafood and driven by a desire to scale improvements, encouraging people to adopt solutions and create the greatest possible impact. Looking toward 2030, SFP is working to address some of the most challenging issues in seafood sustainability, including reducing bycatch of endangered, threatened, and protected species; promoting effective co-management in small-scale fisheries; reducing illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing; and supporting ecosystem-level aquaculture management to conserve and regenerate habitat.