The new GDST is offering an inclusive and flexible approach to participation!

Thank you for your interest in the newly re-organized GDST.  A key goal of the new GDST is to assemble a global community of traceability-minded companies, industry organizations, and interested stakeholders.  Our new partnership structure is open not only to Producer/Marketer partners (as in the past) but now includes new partnership categories for traceability solution providers, certification and benchmarking organizations, and non-industry stakeholders including NGOs, academics, and government agencies.  There are now be four categories of partnership:

• Producer/Marketer Partners – companies directly involved in the production, trade, or marketing of seafood (along with associations exclusively representing small scale producers);
• Solution Provider Partners – companies involved in developing and selling IT software/technology and seafood traceability services;
• Facilitator Partners – organizations involved in seafood certification or benchmarking who are adopting the standard and/or integrating it into their own tools that facilitate adoption;
• Stakeholder Partners – NGOs, academics, and government entities.

Within each category, we are offering four tiers of partnership.  Each tier reflects a different level of commitment/engagement and comes with some differences in partner benefits.  The specifics of each tier vary among the four partnership categories, but in general terms the four tiers are:

• Founder Tier -- for partners prepared to make a three-year commitment and to take strong public action in support of the implementation and impact of the GDST standards
  
• Leader Tier -- for partners prepared to make a two-year commitment and to be among the leaders helping support the implementation and impact of the GDST standards
• Endorser Tier -- for partners prepared to make a one-year commitment, including a basic public declaration in support of industry-wide adoption of the GDST standards
• Supporter Tier -- for partners who are interested in implementing the GDST standards but are not yet ready to do so and would like to receive regular GDST updates.

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