Blue Foods with a Human Rights Lens

A flagship collaboration of the Stanford Center for Human Rights and International Justice was featured in the Stanford Report this week. 

Center Faculty Co-Director David Cohen and Associate Director of Strategy and Program Development Jessie Brunner have been working since 2023 with the Center for Ocean Solutions on the Blue Food Transformations in Indonesia project, which draws on Indonesia’s wealth of blue foods — animals, plants, and algae harvested from freshwater and marine environments — to improve nutrition, food security, and livelihoods, including for populations that have historically been marginalized. 

Together, the team has been working to analyze data on household consumption, income, and health across Indonesia – alongside trade and ecological data – to identify regions and populations that can most benefit from greater blue food consumption, where access to blue foods will need to increase to meet those goals, trade patterns may need to shift to make blue foods more available for domestic needs, and where coastal management needs to be strengthened to better support local consumption. 

In his interview with Stanford News, Cohen underscored the importance of using a human rights lens when evaluating environmental issues. 

“You’re not going to produce blue foods when there’s no fish left to catch in the waters of your community because mangroves have been cleared for development, coral reefs destroyed, fish catches reduced,” said Cohen, who is also a professor of environmental social sciences in the Doerr School of Sustainability and of classics in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. “What you’re going to see is a displacement of populations, which is going on already in some places. That’s a humanitarian crisis central to the human rights work we do.”

Read the full Stanford News story at the following link: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/02/blue-food-project-taps-the-ocean-s-potential-to-feed-the-world