Measuring the Success of Seafood Ecolabelling - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 233

The choice of experts and certifiers to conduct an assessment has proven to be a
vexed issue (Chapter 13). Criteria can be set for the minimum credentials required
by assessment teams (such as in the MSC programme), but finding genuinely in-
dependent experts with the appropriate expertise can be difficult. This is further
complicated when experts from within the same country as the fishery or aquacul-
ture venture operates are appointed as members of an assessment team. Very few
scientists can operate without government support and funding, and so there is a
high incentive for such experts to ensure as far as possible that any government-
managed fishery submitted for assessment does not fail. While there is a natural
tendency to expect local experts to have a better understanding of the venture un-
der assessment (Chapter 13), this may not always be appropriate or even a correct
assumption. Several experts from certification teams have suffered career impacts
by supporting certification assessment outcomes that are viewed as unfavourable
by their government agencies.
The business model adopted by the MSC programme has encouraged price-based
competition between certification companies for securing contracts with capture
fisheries to conduction verification assessments. The MSC does not provide a spe-
cific pricing structure for verification services delivered by certifiers within the MSC
program, and this has led to competition between the main certification companies
for securing fishery assessments.
An analysis of the performance of the two main companies that have assessed
and certified most of the MSC-certified fisheries shows that one company consis-
tently awards more generous scores on environmental performance indicators than
the second company. In the first 20 fisheries certified within the MSC programme,
one certifier awarded a median score of 80 on all the environmental performance
indicators (all Principle 2 scores within nine certified fisheries), while a second cer-
tifier awarded a statistically significantly higher median score of 90 (all Principle
2 scores within 11 certified fisheries) (Figure 10.1). This suggests the probability
Certifier 1
Certifier 2
Score class
Figure 10.1 The frequency distribution for all Principle 2 scores in the MSC-certified fisheries (20)
assessed by the two main certifiers.