Anecdotes and Lessons of a Decade - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 416

Chapter 21
Anecdotes and Lessons of a Decade

Trevor J. Ward and Bruce Phillips

21.1 Introduction

In this final chapter, based on our experiences of the past decade with the Marine
Stewardship Council (MSC) programme, we anticipate some of the key issues that
seafood certification and ecolabelling will face in the next decade. It is clear that
there is currently a rapidly increasing interest in certification and ecolabelling as
one of the potentially useful policy tools that can be applied to fisheries and aqua-
culture globally to promote more environmentally responsible fishing and farming
practices (discussed in Chapters 1 and 20). If recent trends in the uptake of certified
products by resellers continue, the number and spread of ecolabels and product rec-
ommendations based on environmental issues will continue to increase. However,
consumers seem largely unaware of the linkage between ecolabelled seafood and
the ecological conditions of the oceans and fish stocks, or, perhaps even worse, at
this stage not many seem to care (Urch 2003, Pryke 2007; see Chapter 2). Analysis
of other certification systems suggests that even where there is a good measure
of market impact of ecolabelled products, environmental benefits are not always
created as a result (Muller 2002).
In seafood, the dolphin-safe ecolabel is widely credited with reducing the bycatch
of dolphins in tuna fishing. However, the reduction in dolphin bycatch was instigated
by changes in fishery management before the certification system was created, and
the dolphin-safe ecolabel is more effective as a marketing tool than as a mechanism
for reducing dolphin bycatch (Brown 2005). In any case, despite the reduced dolphin
bycatch, the affected dolphin populations have not recovered (Gerrodette & Forcada
2005), and it appears that reducing bycatch alone has not been enough to permit
these populations to be restored. Currently, there is a profusion of dolphin-safe
ecolabels in the global marketplace - apparently competing labels with different
standards of protection for dolphins - and the initial market impact of the generic
dolphin-safe ecolabel seems to have lapsed (see Chapter 10).
Despite the contemporary popularity of voluntary systems of certification and
ecolabelling, some observers (e.g. Muller 2002, Gulbrandsen 2006) argue that it
will continue to be the role of governments to rationalise and manage standards
for seafood production, and that voluntary certification/ecolabelling measures will