Ecolabelling of Seafood: The Basic Concepts - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 6

ventures from submitting their products for assessments, and there are significant
concerns that only large industrial fisheries can afford to secure third-party assess-
ments and high-quality ecolabels (see, e.g., Chapter 14). This of course does not
mean that small fisheries or aquaculture ventures do not necessarily produce highly
sustainable products, only that they cannot afford to demonstrate their sustainability
through an ecolabel from a major ecolabelling programme. This also has implica-
tions for trade between developed and developing countries (see Chapter 9) and for
the products from small-scale and community fisheries (see Chapter 15).
This matter of the cost of the assessment and verification system has often been
raised (Deere 1999, Wessells et al . 2001; Chapter 8) as a discriminatory factor
that can be used to lock out both fisheries and aquaculture products from devel-
oping countries and small-scale ventures from the developed world. Indeed, some
commentators consider that the expensive third-party assessment systems are verg-
ing on replacement of national regulatory systems by imposing a more powerful
(market-based) private sector set of management measures that are beyond the con-
trol of national governments, and transcend the more usual participatory and locally
relevant management systems (Steinberg 1999, O'Rourke 2006). However, others
consider that such private sector (so-called 'non-state') ecolabel systems can only
succeed by working in partnership with government or community-led manage-
ment measures, and so there is little risk of the 'non-state' systems replacing the
'state' systems (Janen 2007) (and see Section 1.5 below).
Despite these issues, and a range of other concerns, a voluntary ecolabelling
system encourages the development of ventures that produce more sustainable
products, and it is assumed that it simultaneously discourages the continuing mar-
keting of the products produced or caught using less desirable procedures. Both
these assertions remain to be tested and confirmed in practice, and at scales that
will have meaningful beneficial impacts on the world's ocean ecosystems. The in-
creasing sales of ecolabelled products is a meaningless measure of improving fish
stocks and reducing environmental impacts unless the ecolabel is tightly linked
to improved fishing or aquaculture practices. Without this, ecolabelling may be
considered to be no more than an invention of the marketplace to enhance price,
market share or market control for specific products. Nonetheless, this contrast
between the best- and worst-performing seafood ventures is an important part of
the effectiveness of the market-based incentive created by ecolabelling, because it
helps to create and maintain the distinctiveness of the better-performing products
and gives consumers the opportunity to express their preference and purchase the
more sustainable products. This is the engine-room of ecolabelling - where the
market-pull is created, without which the increment of incentive to achieve higher
standards of sustainability cannot be realised. However, the true effectiveness of
ecolabelling systems in improving ocean ecosystems, including recovering stocks
of overfished species, remains to be confirmed. Indeed, deciding if ecolabelling is
working, in the sense of delivering ecological sustainability outcomes, is a com-
plex problem covering many aspects of the seafood business and the science of