Measuring the Success of Seafood Ecolabelling - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 213

objectives and activities that in many cases will be competing has proven to be much
more challenging (US Oceans Commission 2004). Although such integration at the
operational level is difficult, the central technical issues are reasonably clear. For
example, the central issue of maintaining healthy and resilient populations of the
species being harvested revolves not around maximising production, but around
optimising production based on standards for species conservation rather than pro-
duction (Caddy & Cochrane 2001, Hilborn et al . 2003).
In response to the seemingly intractable problem of identifying and understanding
all the issues of ecological sustainability in fisheries and aquaculture, and despite
the uncertainty about their effectiveness, market-based incentives are often invoked
as a potentially important tool that may be able to direct industry practices towards
more sustainable activities (Gislason et al. 2000, Wessells 2000, Sinclair et al . 2002,
May et al. 2003, Jaffry et al . 2004). The diffuse nature of the sustainability concept,
the lack of a common conceptual model for integrating across the space and time
scales and diversity of governance systems, and the lack of agreed standards at any
level of the concept provide for a very diffuse target for certification or ecolabelling
systems and their operations. Nonetheless, market-based incentives have become a
popular tool for creating a shift in production practices despite the few demonstrated
ecological or environmental outcomes that can be uniquely ascribed to such tools
and the ongoing debate about their effectiveness (Muller 2002, Kaiser & Edwards-
Jones 2006, Wennberg & Bjerner 2006; see Box 10.1).
Box 10.1 Resolving the Unsustainable Use of Fishery Resources:
A Perspective on the Issues
Ecolabelling is seen by many as a way of using the power of consumers to affect
markets. For fisheries, the most prominent ecolabelling scheme is the indepen-
dent certification scheme run by the Marine Stewardship Council. But very little
hard research has been done into the effectiveness of ecolabelling schemes in
meeting sustainable management objectives. On the one hand, proponents of
such schemes argue that they offer cachet to exporters in the form of access
to niche markets and thus allow them to charge a price premium. On the other
hand, many developing countries have a negative perception of the impact that
environmental labels have on their trade flows and of the costs of compliance.
Research attention could profitably be devoted to assembling hard evidence with
which to test the effect on the market (and resource sustainability) that volun-
tary ecolabelling schemes such as the MSC initiative really have. Research could
also usefully focus on the actual economic costs of such schemes, including the
direct, indirect, one-off and recurring costs of compliance, as well as the po-
tential WTO implications of government funding for independent schemes. A
considerable amount of energy and resources are being expended by some in
the seafood industry to promote the purchase of seafood only from sustainable