Measuring the Success of Seafood Ecolabelling - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 209

and set of measures presently being developed are the Food and Agriculture Or-
ganization (FAO) programmes, including their global ecolabelling guidelines (see
Chapter 3), the efficacy of which has still to be determined.
Marine living resources are currently managed under systems that range from
open access (no effective constraints - the situation that applies for a number of
fish stocks in international waters) to highly constrained and intensively managed
local fishing controls (such as the high-value near-shore species in many developed
countries). In addition, a large proportion of the world's fish are taken in small-scale
subsistence fisheries in developing tropical nations where management controls
are not always effective. Good fisheries management, including the introduction
of more ecosystem-based approaches, offers the potential to resolve some of the
important issues of sustainable production of seafood (Beddington et al . 2007), but
given the diversity of governance systems operating across the world's oceans at
the various scales, even if the biological and ecological issues were sufficiently well
understood, it is not clear that appropriate remedial measures could be determined
or effectively applied through the existing range of global governance measures.
Designing ecosystem-based fisheries measures that are both effective and have a
high likelihood of adoption by local communities, by fishers, by fisheries managers
and traders across the developed and developing world, appears to be the pre-
eminent challenge of the coming decades for marine resource managers. Given the
politics, economic and food security issues of marine resource management, and
the inherent inertia in promoting paradigm shift, the problem of creating a major
structural change to fisheries and aquaculture management systems seems likely to
remain intractable for at least several more decades.

10.2.1 The issues of concern

All fisheries and aquaculture activities generate some form of environmental impact.
The concept of sustainability is based on the use of resources in a manner that
provides for minimal and acceptable levels of impact on all aspects of the species
harvested, and on any related ecosystems, habitats and associated species, while
meanwhile providing for acceptable levels of food security, resource security and
wealth generation for dependent human populations and businesses (WCED 1987).
However, sustainability is also a dynamic and heavily value-laden concept that
depends on the vision and objectives of the communities that are engaged in resource
use and management, and may differ at different scales of organisation and between
cultures (Dahl 1997, and see Chapter 5). For industries that produce seafood (both
aquaculture and wild capture), sustainability can be perhaps best described as the
use of resources and production of seafood in an economically efficient manner
that recognises the importance of the health and integrity of marine ecosystems and
creates levels of impacts that are both low and acceptable to consumers.
Ecosystem-based management is an approach to management of a resource that
links the specific activities of different sectors in the context of overall potential