The Marine Stewardship Council and Developing Countries - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 295

2005; see Chapter 3). These guidelines provide a framework of reference for gov-
ernments and organisations that have (or intend to) establish ecolabels for marine
capture fisheries. The FAO guidelines include the need for independent auditing,
transparency of standard setting and accountability, and the need for standards to
be based on 'good science'. Unfortunately, transparency and inclusivity in standard
setting do not work retroactively. The guidelines also lay down minimum require-
ments and criteria for assessing whether a fishery should be certified - drawing on
FAO's Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. They allow for special consid-
eration to be given to small-scale fisheries (paragraph 29) and for the use of less
elaborate methods for stock assessment (paragraph 32). They also recognise that
there are management measures in small-scale fisheries that can achieve adequate
levels of protection even when there is uncertainty about the state of the resource
(paragraph 32) (FAO 2005).
The wording of the FAO guidelines suggests that special verification proce-
dures can be applied to special situations, as opposed to suggesting the creation
of a general verification system for developing countries (and/or to small-scale,
data-poor fisheries). At the same time, parts of paragraph 32 of the guidelines
could be interpreted as a justification for adopting special standards (not only
special verification systems) in relation to specific cases. Yet, when the MSC
declared that its system would be fully consistent with the FAO guidelines (see
http://www.msc.org/html/ni 241.htm), only two organisational 'refinements' were
deemed to be needed: (1) separating the accreditation of certification bodies from
MSC's standard-setting functions and (2) creating independence between the objec-
tions process (to be paid for by the objecting party) and the certification programme.
So, despite the fact that FAO guidelines open the door for special treatment of de-
veloping country (and/or small-scale, data-poor) fisheries in ecolabelling, the MSC
interprets its own compliance with the FAO guidelines to essentially require only
organisational revision without the further need to specifically address developing
country needs.

14.3 MSC and the South African hake industry

The challenges highlighted above refer to the MSC initiative as a whole. The
specific MSC certification of South African hake demonstrates how ecolabelling
is far from being a non-political, neutral and scientific tool in the fight against
overfishing and towards guaranteeing the sustainability of marine resources. In
South Africa, MSC certification was sought in an environment of competition with
other hake/hoki suppliers to Northern Hemisphere fish importers and processors
(especially Unilever), of internal divisions within the hake industry (between the
trawling and longlining sectors), and of fears of further quota losses due a post-
apartheid, government-engineered attempt to 'transform' industrial fisheries.