Measuring the Success of Seafood Ecolabelling - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 232

Some forms of industry self-assessment or internal assessment by governments
or industry associations who may have vested interests in awarding or withholding
an ecolabel could be perceived to be weak (see Chapter 1). In such cases, consumers
are provided with very little assurance that the products carrying the ecolabel do
come from ventures that are sustainable. A weak verification system, no matter
how high the standard is, is likely to lead to a weak assessment outcome, which
will degrade the credibility of the ecolabel or guide in the marketplace.
In one supermarket in Perth, Western Australia, the eight brands of canned tuna
on sale in mid-2007 all carried a different form of 'dolphin-safe' ecolabel. Each
ecolabel was obviously designed to suggest to consumers who may respond to such
matters that the tuna contained in the can was caught in a 'dolphin-friendly' manner
and they could be assured that by purchasing that can, they were not supporting
'dolphin-unfriendly' practices (Plate 10.1). Of the eight products, five carried no
details on the can, and provided no information on their websites about the dolphin-
safe label displayed on the product. Of the three remaining cans, two products
(Seakist, John West) are distributed by one company in Australia, and display very
similar dolphin-friendly logos, the meaning of which is clearly explained on the
company's website. The third can (Safcol) also has a simple and clear explanation
of what the logo on its product stands for. However, no companies provide any
details on their cans or websites that would enable a consumer to easily discover
the details of the standard and what technical details support the claims, identify
the owner of the standard or provide any details about what system might be used
for verification. This calls into question the transparency of the standard and the
verification system for each of these eight ecolabels. While this does not mean
that the tuna in these cans is not 'dolphin-friendly', given the tortuous history of
dolphin-safe ecolabels and current issues (discussed in Chapter 1), consumers could
easily be forgiven for being sceptical about unsupported ecolabels on cans of tuna.
It is therefore crucial to any effective and successful seafood incentive programme
that it contains a highly robust verification system that is applied when assessing
compliance of a venture with the programme's standard, and that this is transparent
and readily available to the discerning consumer. This entails a significant cost for
verification of compliance, but given the complexities and the decision systems
involved, and the highly technical nature of many criteria and performance indi-
cators upon which the performance of a venture must be graded (Rice 2000, Link
2005), low-cost assessments are likely to lead to non-robust assessment outcomes.
The cost of verification creates an incentive to use certification companies that can
provide cheap assessments, as is well understood in forestry certification (Ghazoul
2001). If this is achieved using experts with only limited experience of the issues
to be assessed, it may lead to weak outcomes where the decisions to be made are
highly complex. Possibly worse, to reduce the cost of verification and be able to
conduct more assessments, standard owners may be tempted to conduct their own
verification using in-house expertise. This, however, may violate the independence
of the verification system and there is a risk of reaching a biased outcome.