The Marine Stewardship Council and Developing Countries - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 298

To keep up with international competitors , such as New Zealand hoki (also MSC
certified) and to remain ahead of Namibia, Chile and Argentina;

To open up/increase South Africa's share in new markets where there is 'environ-
mental demand' (the UK, Germany, Switzerland) - mostly for frozen products
and to keep ahead of possible developments in 'traditional' chilled fish markets,
such as Spain, Italy and Portugal;

To match buyer demands (Unilever is the biggest buyer of fish for the two main
South African fishing companies) and thus maintain preferred supplier status;
and

To achieve a price premium for sustainable fish management (source: author's
personal interviews).

While these 'official' motivations played a role in gathering momentum for the
application of MSC certification, three other 'unofficial' motivations have provided
a decisive stimulus:

To entrench the then existing interests of major South African fishing companies,
as MSC certification would have benefited the two large companies that domi-
nate the industry. These companies have advanced processing lines, where they
prepare processed products such as fish fingers, burgers, cutlets and marinated
fillets. They dragged SADSTIA and the in-shore hake sector along with them,
even though other companies have much less interest in MSC certification be-
cause their main markets (domestic, Spain, Italy) are not particularly interested
in ecolabelling for fisheries products. By 2006, only three companies in South
Africa held an MSC chain-of-custody certification for hake (I&J, Sea Harvest
and Marpro; see www.msc.org/html/content 1100.htm).

To avoid 'external' transformation in South African fisheries . Through interna-
tional endorsement of 'conservative management', the MSC certification was
expected to provide a guarantee against the possibility of a further reallocation
of quotas away from the main (white-owned) fishing companies. Very few play-
ers held hake rights up to the 1990s, but following the end of apartheid, the
number of rights holders increased to 40-50. The overall argument constructed
by large trawling companies is that it is easier to manage the resource and police
catch levels when there are only a few players in the industry. This argument
was developed and put forward at a key time when the regulatory agency in
charge of managing quotas (MCM) was thoroughly revising its system of quota
allocation.

To marginalise hake longliners . This motivation relates to an intra-industry battle
between the trawling and longlining sectors after the establishment of the latter
in hake fishery in the early 1990s. This conflict is couched in a natural resource
management discourse - the longliners accuse trawlers of destroying the seabed
and of catching small fish, and trawlers accuse longliners of targeting bigger
females. There is no definitive evidence on which of the two techniques affect
the hake stock more adversely, but there is a general scientific understanding
that a badly managed combination of the two can be detrimental.