Measuring the Success of Seafood Ecolabelling - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 219

each of the 5 core issues of sustainability discussed in Section 10.2 above. Each of
these issues could be included in the standard in a number of ways, but each should
be properly represented in its full breadth and scope. This might mean that each
issue was divided into a number of sub-issues dealing with a specific aspect of the
main issue. For example, in dealing with wealth production issues (the third issue),
the standard might specify the limits at which fish populations must be maintained
in relation to benchmarks developed by responsible authorities for this purpose,
or perhaps developed by a fishing community. Alternatively, where it is feasible
to establish a definitive benchmark by reference to external practices, the standard
may refer to an absolute benchmark defined by the standard owner (such as 50% of
the estimated never-fished adult biomass in a fishery may be required to be retained
after each year of fishing, Constable et al . 2000). Or the standard may provide the
details for how, in the context of a specific type of fishery, the standard for the level
of biomass in a sustainable fish population should be calculated taking into account
uncertainties and precaution.
A standard that leaves such decisions to the verification process conducted by a
certifier without providing an exact mechanism for making a meaningful decision is
a flexible standard, and is not likely to be effective because there are different ways
in which the stock biomass limits can be specified by different certifiers for different
fisheries. This creates the situation where the process leading to the most favourable
outcome will be the one advocated by some stakeholders, while the process leading
to the least favourable outcome will be advocated by other stakeholders, leading to
controversy and dispute about a certifier's judgement.
The mechanism for decision taking should take account of the need for flexibility,
but should protect against the possibility of bias or influence of the decision by
vested interest groups. Decisions achieved by consensus of stakeholder groups, or
industry or government agencies, are notoriously prone to motivational bias, and
any decision-making process that is used to assess the fishery against the standard
must ensure that any such adverse bias can be identified and avoided. The standard
needs to be written so that it guards against bias having adverse consequences in
the verification process, and provides the smallest possible manoeuvring room for
variable interpretation.
For each matter identified in the standard, an operational expression, or a robust
guide to operational interpretation should be provided to the verifiers/certifiers, to
producers and to consumers. Without this, the standard will be (correctly) consid-
ered to be only guidance to certifiers and consumers, and not a definitive standard.
This issue has also plagued forest certification, and remains unresolved (Ghazoul
2001). Since it is difficult to conceive of the operational elements of a seafood
sustainability standard that could be applied to every form of fishery or aquacul-
ture venture, for a certification or ecolabelling initiative intended to apply broadly
across many different types of ventures and regions, it may be necessary for an
effective standard to be formulated in a hierarchical manner, and specified in detail
for each of a range of types of fisheries and aquaculture ventures expected to be
encountered.