The Marine Stewardship Council Programme - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 84

The organisations came together in the mid-1990s and the MSC was launched
in 1997, becoming a fully independent non-profit organisation in 1999. The MSC
standard for sustainable fishing was developed over the period 1997-1999 and
involved over 300 international stakeholder consultations with input from govern-
ment scientists, the marine conservation community, academics and the industry.
From the beginning, accessibility for developing world fisheries was a prominent
issue with the stakeholders from developing countries that were represented in the
consultations. This has remained a strong area of activity (see below).
Today, the MSC is a registered UK charity with non-profit status in the US
and Australia. The MSC has a staff of 35 professionals operating from four offices
around the world in London, Seattle, Sydney and Tokyo (the Tokyo office opened in
April 2007). A separate trading arm - Marine Stewardship Council International -
handles the MSC's registered trademark and logo-licensing activities, with net
profits from the company going to the MSC charity.

4.3 How the MSC programme works

4.3.1 The concepts
The MSC's approach is very simple - fisheries voluntarily apply to be assessed
by independent, third-party certification bodies against the MSC's rigorous envi-
ronmental standard for sustainable fishing. If a fishery passes and is certified, then
companies sourcing fish from that fishery can apply to use the MSC's blue ecolabel
on seafood products bearing the following statement:

This product comes from a fishery which has been certified to the Marine Steward-
ship Council's environmental standard for a well-managed and sustainable fishery
(www.msc.org).

The ecolabel is not necessarily applied to all the products from certified fisheries,
even though they meet the MSC standard. So, while a fishery may become certified,
its products may or may not carry the MSC ecolabel, depending on how sensitive
the market is considered to be to the use of the ecolabel (see Chapter 1 for the
distinction between certification and ecolabelling). This is a commercial decision
for the companies selling seafood products, but no company may publicly claim
their fish is MSC certified except by authorised use of the MS ecolabel.
The MSC standard for sustainable fishing is an internationally recognised set
of principles for measuring the management and sustainability of fisheries and,
as noted above, was developed through extensive global consultation with fish-
eries experts between 1997 and 1999. The standard comprises three measurable
principles: the condition of the fish stock, the impact of the fishery on the marine
ecosystem and the quality of the fishery management system (MSC 2002, May
et al . 2003). The programme is also the leading marine certification and la-
belling programme that is fully consistent with the FAO (United Nations Food and