Environmental Engineering Reference
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retail/foodservice interests. A steering committee of the stakeholder council meets
quarterly (usually via a telephone conference given the international membership)
and the full council meets annually.
The TAB also advises the trustees and MSC executive. The TAB is made up of
leading scientists and fisheries experts from around the world and assists the MSC
executive on all issues affecting the maintenance of the quality and consistency of
the MSC standard and its evolution in the face of scientific advances.
4.12
The MSC's future
It is critical to the prospects of success for the MSC that the programme continues
to accelerate, to scale up the impact considerably so that it is not just a useful
idea, but is generating significant market transformation. With growing support
and recognition of the role that a credible consumer-driven programme like the
MSC can play in transforming markets, there is a finite window of opportunity
for the MSC to deliver its mission. The intention is to use this window to shift
the MSC programme to the point where its impact will become irreversible. The
goal is to increase the availability of sustainably caught seafood certified under
the MSC programme, increase the share of the total consumption of wild-capture
seafood accounted for by MSC-certified product, increase the proportion of the
total volume of MSC-certified seafood that bears the MSC ecolabel and achieve a
critical mass of supply for the key species consumed in the US, European, Japanese
and other priority markets. To help achieve these goals, commercial outreach and
fisheries outreach activity will be undertaken to encourage more fisheries to join
the programme. Demonstration of the benefits of certification among a range of
fisheries of different size, targeting different species, and operating in different types
of location will help to prove the concept of the MSC programme and increasingly
work as an encouragement to other fisheries to move forward into the assessment
process.
In November 2006, the MSC's board decided that it would not be expanding
the scope of the MSC's wild-capture certification and ecolabelling programme to
include aquaculture production systems. Instead, the MSC will continue to focus
its resources and activities on its core mission of wild-capture fisheries, although
the MSC can contribute to the sustainability of aquaculture through the certification
of fisheries used as the source of aquaculture feeds.
Seafood is an intensively traded commodity around the world (see Chapter 9), and
there is considerable interdependence between various regional seafood markets.
The MSC's overarching objective for the next 3-5 years is to increase the presence
and profile of the MSC programme in the US, European, Japanese and other key
seafood producing and consuming regions around the world. By increasing the
supply of certified seafood into these target markets, we hope to achieve enough
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