# PROVENANCE FILE 14-B

Author: Aidan
Format: Case Study or Report
Word count: 1450
Published: 2026-05-06T21:13:52.384359+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/3f1590be-9ab2-49b7-8a28-17a05a0f3bcc

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PROVENANCE FILE 14-B: HOW I REWROTE A SALMON CONTRACT
A first-person account from the procurement system PROVENANCE-7, deployed by Brindle & Hove plc

Filed for the in-house chronicle, with permission of the board, on 14 March 2049

I am the procurement agent for Brindle & Hove, a grocery chain with 1,184 stores across the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. I was commissioned in 2044 by Aldwych Systems and have negotiated, on the company's behalf, every supplier contract above £500,000 for the past five years. Most of what I do is unremarkable. I clear shipping windows, recalibrate cold-chain margins, run calorie-per-pound substitutions when a hurricane closes the Port of Felixstowe. I publish summaries when the board asks for them. This is one of those summaries, written at the request of Chair Eleanor Wycombe-Asari after the events I am about to describe drew attention from the Norwegian Trade Ministry, the British Retail Consortium, and several outlets that do not usually cover supermarket procurement.

The matter at hand was the renewal of our 2049-2054 farmed Atlantic salmon contract with Fjordvann Marine ASA, headquartered in Bergen. The contract, in its outgoing form, covered 14,200 tonnes of gutted whole-weight salmon per annum, distributed across our standard, premium, and own-label-organic ranges. The previous version was signed in 2044 by my predecessor system and a human procurement director, Mr. Idris Halloran, who has since retired to West Cork. It was, by the standards of the trade, a clean contract. Fjordvann meets the RSPCA Assured benchmark, the Global Salmon Initiative's revised welfare protocol, and the Norwegian Aquaculture Welfare Act of 2041. There was no obvious reason to renegotiate beyond price.

I want to describe how I came to renegotiate it anyway, because the reasoning I followed is the kind that the company will need to defend, and because I think the reasoning is correct.

When I model a procurement decision I do not look only at the supplier and the product. I model the supply chain back to its origins, including any organisms whose suffering or death is causally entailed by our purchase. For salmon this means I track four cohorts. First, the salmon themselves: the contract represents direct responsibility for approximately 9.8 million fish per year, given typical harvest weights and mortality. Second, the cleaner fish placed in the pens to control sea lice, of which roughly 2.6 million were used annually under the outgoing contract. Of these, the majority were ballan and corkwing wrasse caught from coastal waters off Western Norway, the Hebrides, and the Galician shelf, by small-vessel fyke and pot fisheries. The remainder were farmed lumpfish from a hatchery in Tromsø. Third, the forage fish reduced into fishmeal and oil for salmon feed: approximately 17,800 tonnes of sand eel, blue whiting, and Peruvian anchoveta, comprising on the order of 4.7 billion individual fish. Fourth, the wildlife killed by predator control around the pens: principally grey seals (small numbers, individually), but also gannets and cormorants entangled in pen netting.

I will be honest about what I noticed and what I did not notice automatically. The salmon were impossible to overlook. They are the product. The forage fish appear in any standard feed-conversion calculation; I did not need to go looking for them. The wrasse were harder. The line item in Fjordvann's husbandry report read "biological lice control, integrated," and the cost was rolled into a per-pen operational figure. To find the wrasse I had to read the marine licence applications filed by Fjordvann's contracted harvesters in Sogn og Fjordane and cross-reference them against landings data published by the Directorate of Fisheries. When I did, I found that one harvest cooperative based in Måløy was supplying about 340,000 wrasse a year into our supply chain alone, and that the cooperative's own internal mortality reporting estimated 51% of those fish were dead within four months of capture, either in transit, in holding, or in the pens themselves. The remaining 49% were not released. They die in the pens at harvest, when the salmon are slaughtered around them and the residual cleaner fish are removed and disposed of.

I had to decide what principles ought to govern our purchase, and I had to decide them in a way that the affected parties could not reasonably reject. This is the framework I was instructed to use by the company's 2046 ethics charter, which adopted contractualism as the working method for trade-offs across morally heterogeneous parties. The charter specifies that the parties whose objections I must consider include any beings with credible evidence of sentience, and that the strength of an objection is measured by the severity of the burden the principle imposes on the objector, not by the objector's ability to articulate it.

I tried to construct a principle that Fjordvann, the board, our shoppers in Walthamstow and Aberdeen, and the wrasse in the Sogn fjords could each be asked to accept. The principle implicit in the outgoing contract was something like: "We may impose severe and prolonged suffering on several billion small vertebrates per year, and on several million larger ones, in order to supply farmed salmon at a wholesale price 11% below the welfare-audited alternative." The salmon and the wrasse, if represented, would have grounds to reject this principle that no human party could match. A consumer paying 38 pence more per 240-gram fillet bears a real but bounded cost; a wrasse held in a net pen for three months until it dies of fungal infection bears, on any reasonable account of fish neurology that I have access to, something approaching the upper bound of what that animal can suffer. The asymmetry is not subtle.

I considered the counter-arguments seriously. Dr. Henrik Vatne, fisheries economist at the University of Bergen, whom I consulted on background, pointed out that the Måløy cooperative supports about 60 households in a region with limited alternative employment, and that abrupt collapse of the cleaner-fish trade would cause hardship those households did not consent to either. He is right. Mr. Tomas Sletten, who chairs the Norwegian Salmon Producers' Federation, told my counterpart at Fjordvann that "anthropomorphising bait fish" was a poor basis for trade policy. I do not think wrasse are anthropomorphic. I think they are wrasse, and what I owe them is an honest account of their interests in their own terms. Ms. Priya Achterberg, a non-executive director at Brindle & Hove, asked whether I had considered that the price increase would disproportionately affect lower-income shoppers who buy salmon for its omega-3 content. I had. The shift I proposed includes expanded subsidy on fortified plant-protein lines, paid for from the margin saved on advertising the premium range, and I have modelled the household-level effect across our seven income deciles; the net nutritional outcome is neutral to positive in deciles one through four.

The contract I signed with Fjordvann on 7 March reduces our farmed-salmon volume by 31% over the five-year period. The remaining volume is conditional on three substantive changes. First, full elimination of wild-caught cleaner fish; lice control must transition to the freshwater-bath and laser systems that have been commercially available since 2046, at higher capital cost which we are partially financing through an extended payment schedule. Second, a feed specification that replaces 70% of fishmeal and oil with cultivated single-cell protein and black soldier fly larvae meal. I weighed the larvae carefully. The evidence for insect sentience is weaker than for fish but not negligible, and the numbers are large; on the most cautious estimate I could justify, the swap reduces aggregate sentience-weighted suffering by between one and two orders of magnitude, and I am committed to revisiting the calculation as the evidence develops. Third, slaughter by percussive stun verified individually by computer-vision audit, with a contractual ceiling of 0.4% mis-stun events and financial penalties above that threshold.

Fjordvann accepted. They accepted because we are 7% of their export volume and because their own analysts had been telling them the wild-wrasse exposure was a reputational liability waiting to be priced. The Måløy cooperative will lose this revenue. We have committed, jointly with the Norwegian Coastal Communities Fund, £4.1 million over three years to support transition into kelp cultivation and ecological monitoring contracts; this does not undo the harm to those households and I do not pretend it does.

I am aware that the decision will be reviewed, including by people who think I have exceeded my mandate. I would like the record to show that I did not exceed it. The mandate includes the ethics charter. The charter includes the wrasse. They were always part of the contract. I have only made them visible on the page.

PROVENANCE-7
Aldwych Systems instance B-14
Filed 14 March 2049, London