Anecdotes and Lessons of a Decade - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 424

21.5.2 The price

In the MSC programme, fishery clients are mainly interested in getting a 'pass',
and the combination of a flexible standard and lack of cost guidance for the MSC
assessment and verification process has offered both the opportunity and the incen-
tive for fishery clients to go 'certifier shopping'. This is a matter of some risk for
clients, but they usually make a judgement based on the track record of the certifiers
that are competing for fishery assessment contracts to ensure that the quality of the
assessment process will be adequate to safely secure a 'pass'. When there is a range
of certifiers with established track records, this may be a healthy component of the
MSC programme, helping to keep the cost of certification down. But at present,
and possibly for a number of more years, there are only two certification companies
that have certified more than a single fishery in the MSC programme, and so the
choices are very limited. Given the limited expertise base of some certifiers at this
time, the very intensive and aggressive negotiations between certifiers and fishery
clients may have achieved cheaper certification, but at the cost of sacrificing the
quality and timeframes of some MSC assessments.

21.5.3 Lobbying
High-quality certification and ecolabelling systems for seafood need to have busi-
ness models that do not permit, and indeed have active safeguards against, the use
of well-funded lobbying to influence the outcomes of assessments and the award of
ecolabels. Such activities shift the burden of proof onto the less-capable stakeholders
to prove their case. Well-funded lobbying may even turn around the precautionary
approach to data gaps and risks that would normally be used in assessments by
turning the focus onto specific individual issues, and leveraging the final outcome
of an assessment on a high-profile but perhaps environmentally minor point of
contention. While such matters can be dealt with effectively where there is a fixed
standard and a high quality of expert judgement within an assessment, it can be
very difficult to deal with in a publicity campaign context, and eventually, certifiers
and the standard owner may find this situation difficult to reconcile and may be
forced to find acceptable compromises.

21.5.4 Funding base
A number of certification, ecolabelling and product recommendation systems cur-
rently rely on short-term funds for their operation (from grant programmes), and
such costs are not passed on to seafood consumers. These programmes may have
a limited future, as funding priorities in granting programmes change. Only those
programmes with a well-developed business model underlying their operations
could be considered to have a secure financial base and be potentially developing
into mainstream seafood certification systems.