Ecolabelling of Seafood: The Basic Concepts - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 7

biodiversity conservation and management (see Chapter 10). In any case, while
seafood ecolabelling has been operational for more than a decade, it may still be
too early to be able to actually measure any significant reduction in impacts on
ocean ecosystems, although Agnew et al . 2006 identified some types of effects that
may be detectable from the MSC programme.
Ecolabels are designed and propagated to reduce ecological impacts and improve
the ecological-friendliness of practices used in production, harvesting or growing
of products, with a view to ultimately increasing the sustainability of all prod-
ucts across all the market. To achieve this, they must create 'market-pull' through
differential appeal to consumers who are sensitive to the impact on sustainability
inferred by the product endorsement of the ecolabel. The market-pull is created
through establishing the credibility of the product and its ecolabel endorsement
with potentially sensitive consumers, and a credible differential from competing
products in the same marketplace.

1.3 How ecolabelling works

Ecolabels are normally applied as labels or tags, such as a recognisable logo on a
retail product pack. Where individual products are small, or where they are normally
marketed in a combined or processed pack (such as a canned product), the label
may be applied to the pack rather than the individual product itself (Plate 1.1).
The basic approach to seafood certification and ecolabelling implemented by the
MSC programme has been derived from established practice in several other sec-
tors (and specifically timber - the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)) and adapted
to suit the needs of the seafood sustainability issues and the industry. A number
of subsequent certification systems have used the MSC as the model for a policy
framework and implementation system (such as the Australian Sustainable Fish-
eries Guidelines; see below), and to that extent the MSC must be considered to have
created a significant influence in seafood sustainability. The practical application
of certification and ecolabelling in the MSC programme is described in detail in the
series of articles by Botsford (2003), Chaffee (2003), Chaffee et al . (2003), May
et al . (2003), Phillips (2003) and Ward (2003), and updated in Chapter 4 of this
topic. These contributions recognise and describe the potential of, and the many
difficulties involved with, seafood certification and ecolabelling. Particularly impor-
tant obstacles to be overcome were recognised as the lack of established precedents
or well-proven models of global governance directly relevant to seafood ecola-
belling, the balance to be achieved between making a programme popular with the
industry and consumers versus the achievement of difficult and unpopular changes
required in fishery practices to reduce impacts on the environment and on fish stocks
themselves, and the delicate advocacy required to build a worldwide constituency
for ecolabelling with actual costs and theoretical benefits within a highly com-
petitive and price-sensitive industry sector. A key feature of the difficulties is