Anecdotes and Lessons of a Decade - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 430

recommendations, and where this is unclear or the consumers do not wish to check
the verification, then they will rely almost exclusively on the standing and quality
of the organisation that promotes and endorses the certification 'brand' (the stan-
dard owner). For buying guides and product recommendations, the standing of the
'brand' may be the key factor in driving market appeal to discerning consumers
when the marketplace becomes saturated with claims of ecological sustainability.

21.10 The evolutionary path

As certification and ecolabelling begins to mature in the seafood sector, it will most
likely follow the history of other ecolabelling systems as follows:
Competing ecolabels will be developed and promoted, specifically addressing
weaknesses (or strengths) of a benchmark 'gold-star' programme, for a quicker
certification at a cheaper price and with lower maintenance requirements. Those
competing labels will be based on different standards, and possibly apply to a
subset of the seafood products and regions, where specific points of product
differentiation can be developed and applied for market advantage.
Individual purchaser-provider agreements and standards will arise (developed
and applied by individual resellers, such as store labels).
Procurement standards will be developed and applied by resellers as a group to
suit specific regional market demands/demographics (such as GLOBALGAP,
Chapter 6).
Industry-wide standards will be developed to cover sustainability combined with
other food issues such as safety and quality, and will compete with ecolabels and
certified seafood products (to meet the competition with non-seafood products
and emerging government regulation issues).
National government sustainability standards will be further developed to meet
international requirements and nascent global standards (such as those of FAO,
Chapter 3) and to embed developing national expectations about minimum per-
formance standards.

During the maturing process, there will be an increasing coalescing of both support-
ers and opponents to specific fishery outcomes and design strengths and weaknesses
in the specific ecolabelling programmes. Supporters may even evolve into organ-
isations themselves and operate to secure continued support within the seafood
industry to try to maintain established market benefits and secure further benefits
in the future. The opponents may become better organised and try to secure ma-
jor changes in certification systems, and move to build or support alternative and
competing ecolabels that better serve their interests and constituencies.
For seafood certification and ecolabelling programmes with a global perspective,
there is an inevitable trade-off that has to be achieved between inclusion of more
fisheries into the programme and the level of environmental protection encoded