Ecolabelling of Seafood: The Basic Concepts - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 5

determine if their products can carry the ecolabel. The voluntary nature of ecola-
belling is an important aspect of consumer appeal, because this infers that products
that do not meet the sustainability standard would not be submitted by the producers
for assessment, and hence do not carry the ecolabel. Consumers may interpret this
as meaning that only the ecolabelled seafood products available in their marketplace
are indeed produced in a sustainable manner. However, this inference is only true
if all seafood products have equal access to the voluntary process of assessment
and certification, and if the process of compliance assessment is comprehensive
and is applied equally across all the products submitted for assessment. This is
not always the case because first, the assessment and certification process may be
costly and preclude smaller or less profitable fisheries from participation in many
ecolabelling programmes, and second, because different ecolabelling programmes
have different ways of determining if a product complies with the ecolabel standard
and the standards themselves may differ between programmes.
The different interpretations of ecological sustainability, and the different value
systems in the various programmes, mean that a product endorsement from one
ecolabelling programme may not carry with it the same inference of sustainability
as a product endorsement from another programme. One of the central problems
is determining which aspects of sustainability an ecolabel will represent. Seafood
ecolabelling is focused on the environmental and ecological aspects of sustainabil-
ity, but even so, there are many issues that may be considered within an ecolabelling
programme. In assessing an individual fishery or aquaculture farm, the findings of
a broadly based certification system (covering many ecological aspects of seafood
capture and production) may differ from that of a more narrowly based system
that covers only a limited set of the issues (such as the dolphin-safe ecolabel for
tuna products) because of the different scope of issues considered. And further, it
has proven difficult in independent third-party certifications (see below) to ensure
that the standard and criteria are always consistently interpreted in the same way
by different certification companies. These inconsistencies have resulted in biased
outcomes in some cases, and this raises the prospect that some products might be
given an ecolabel that assumes a different standard of sustainability from another
product that carries an ecolabel, even when issued from the same programme (see
Chapter 10).
Voluntary submission of products for ecolabelling carries with it the respon-
sibility for meeting the various costs of conducting the compliance assessment
and meeting any conditions or corrective actions that may be required to keep the
product certified. These costs include the cost of the certification companies in
conducting the assessment, the cost of preparing and presenting data and infor-
mation about the products that match the requirements of the ecolabel programme
and the ongoing costs of dealing with conditions and the costs of verification of
continuing compliance. While third-party assessments of compliance are the most
rigorous form of compliance assessment, the cost is much higher than for a less
rigorous type of assessment, such as an industry self-assessment. This high level
of costs of securing an ecolabel may deter low-profit margin and small-turnover