Why crew nutrition belongs in our risk conversations

By Coby Sella, CEO, Agwa

Open the cold store on most ships two or three weeks into a long voyage and you will find a familiar picture. The fresh vegetables loaded at the last port are long gone. What remains is frozen, tinned, and dried, and it will carry the crew until the next call, which might be a week away or three.

This year's Day of the Seafarer carries the line "Carrying world trade. Carrying the risks." I think it is the right note to strike. The shipping industry carries around 90 percent of world trade, and the people who make that possible live with conditions most of us on shore never see. The campaign asks us to recognise not only the contribution but the risks and sacrifices behind it.

When our industry talks about risk, we name the visible ones first. Heavy weather. Machinery failure. Fatigue from watch patterns. Last year's campaign rightly put violence and harassment on the table, and the training requirements that have followed are a real step. These are the risks that make it onto a register, into a safety management system, into a loss-prevention review.

Some risks are quieter. They do not arrive as a single event. They accumulate slowly over a rotation, and because nothing dramatic happens on any given day, they rarely get written down anywhere. Nutrition is one of them, and we have been underrating it for a long time.

The research on human factors has matured a great deal. Analyses of marine accidents now attribute between 75 and 96 percent of incidents to human factors, and the better work treats these as organisational and systemic rather than as individual failings. We have learned to look upstream of the moment of error, at workload, at rest, at safety culture. Food belongs in that same picture. It influences recovery, immune resilience, fatigue tolerance and alertness over weeks at sea. Yet it is almost always filed under catering or welfare, well away from any discussion of risk.

This is not a fringe concern to the people living it. In one study of more than 800 seafarers, 98.8 percent said a healthy diet matters to their wellbeing, even as the same body of research shows onboard diets skewing heavy on calories and light on what the body actually needs. The gap between what crews want and what a long voyage provides is structural. Fresh produce keeps for roughly five to seven days. After that, for the rest of a voyage that may run several weeks, the fresh option is mostly gone.

A diet that leans on preserved food rarely causes an incident on its own; what it does, over a long rotation, is erode resilience at the margins, and at sea, the margins are where things get decided. A crew that has eaten well for three weeks is in a different state from one that ran out of fresh food in the first week and has been topping up from the freezer since.

There is a supply question here too. In engineering, we build in redundancy as a matter of course. We do not run a vessel on a single power source or a single navigational input. For fresh food, most ships still depend on a single pathway: whatever was loaded in port. When that pathway is disrupted by delays, weather, or congestion, fresh produce is among the first things to go. We have all watched over these past few years how fragile supply chains can be.

None of this is unsolvable. Onboard growing has reached the point where a vessel can keep a steady supply of fresh greens going through an entire voyage rather than only its first week, without asking the crew to take on agricultural work they were never hired for. It is the problem we work on at Agwa. The wider point stands on its own: a part of the food supply that has always been treated as inconsistent can now be made dependable.

What I have come to understand, watching how crews respond, is how much weight the small things carry once you are far from shore. A long voyage is mostly steel, machinery, and routine. The presence of something fresh and alive, and the few minutes a day it asks for, matters to people in a way that is hard to capture on a spreadsheet and easy to underestimate from an office.

The risks seafarers carry are real, and naming them matters. But the ones most worth our attention are not only the dramatic ones; they include the slow, everyday conditions that decide whether someone finishes a long rotation as steady as they began it. Nutrition sits squarely among them, and unlike many of the risks we worry about, it is one we already know how to do something about.

The question I keep returning to is the one I think the whole industry should sit with: in practical terms, what can we do to make daily life better for the people who keep world trade moving?