Anecdotes and Lessons of a Decade - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 427

most countries it is not likely that genuinely independent and high-quality technical
expertise and knowledge can be secured through the use of local specialists. This
is because most capture fisheries are managed by governments, which also con-
trol the careers and future of most of the technical specialists who have the most
comprehensive knowledge of the local fisheries. Whilst the use of local expertise
can be important, it should be taken in the context of a broader normalisation of
knowledge, data and evidence, such as would usually only be available through the
use of experts from other jurisdictions (and typically other countries). Use of only
local experts to assess a fishery will normally expose the assessment systems to the
possibility of motivational bias, and this may be difficult to either detect or correct.
The recent proposal to award an MSC certification to two fisheries in Japan (the
snow crab and flathead flounder fisheries; www.msc.org) without any conditions
has been based on assessment by a team of local experts. The two fisheries scored
high on the environmental criteria, with judgements favouring the fishery despite
the apparent lack of data and knowledge about such impacts in both fisheries.
Such outcomes also expose the Achilles' heel of a flexible standard: many different
technical interpretations of the sustainability standard will be approved by the stan-
dard owner, particularly if there are no public objections to force an independent
evaluation of the quality of the assessment process or the outcomes. The reduced
standards that seem likely to be accepted for these Japanese fisheries may be inter-
preted as a first step by the MSC to bring Asian fisheries into the programme, but
they also bring into question the motivations and the control systems of the MSC
programme. The lack of support in Asia for certification and ecolabelling programs
has been identified as limitation of the overall ecolabelling system for seafood
(Jacquet & Pauly 2007). To further help address this deficiency, the MSC has opened
an office in Japan to promote the concept of MSC-labelled products. Recently, a
Hong Kong retailer (ThreeSixty) released a number of MSC-labelled products for
the China market, building on the growing interest in MSC-labelled products in
Japan.

21.8 Environmental monitoring

Fishing and aquaculture systems are about generating wealth. Monitoring pro-
grammes may be used in various ways in fisheries management to assist with the
achievement of that objective, and there is a clear role for industry and independent
monitoring in situations where there may be local or region-wide efficiency gains
to be made and hence higher financial returns to fishing or aquaculture ventures.
In contrast, where monitoring is required to document trends or activities that are
more likely to result in a penalty being applied to the venture (such as monitoring
to ensure that there is no fishing in closed areas, no breach of mesh size or failing
to observe industry-required practices), then industry self-monitoring is less likely
either to be tolerated or to be able to effectively and independently used to document
such breaches.