Anecdotes and Lessons of a Decade - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 431

into the standard. The tension is between the imperative to certify large numbers
of fisheries as a mechanism to rapidly create the market pull across many fisheries
and the opportunity to create a 'gold-star' benchmark for ecologically sustainable
fishing that could only ever be achieved by a small proportion of the world's fisheries
but delivers real environmental change.
The MSC programme has taken the broad coverage approach rather than the
high standard approach. In establishing and delivering this balance, the MSC has
missed the opportunity to create the 'gold-star' ecological standard in fisheries
certification. It now seems that both the voluntary assessment and public sector
(government) approaches stand to deliver a broad base of certification designed to
certify the majority of fisheries. As a model for delivering broad-based incremen-
tal environmental improvements, such approaches are eminently defendable and
supportable, but they leave vacant the question of the 'gold-star' ecological stan-
dard. This vacant territory may open the opportunity for competing programmes to
develop, creating yet another competitive element that will assist to drive environ-
mental improvements in seafood production, but it could also serve to create even
further confusion for consumers.
Developing countries are well aware of the issues surrounding seafood certifi-
cation, and the possible benefits, but they also have imperatives in food security
that are not similarly faced by developed nations in the seafood sector. Given that
creating environmental improvements may be only one of many factors that have
high priority in developing countries, it may become important for regional certifi-
cation systems of the future to develop an equivalent 'sustainability standard' that
can be applied in developing nations. This means that effectively the standard for
developing nations should be different. The most practical response to this matter
is likely to be the development of new certification and ecolabel systems that deal
appropriately with the issues of developing nations, such as setting acceptable envi-
ronmental benchmarks and providing for fair trade and equitable social outcomes.
This would provide relevant certification business models that can be implemented
in developing nations.
The MSC ecolabel, like the FSC label upon which it is closely modelled, is
a narrow form of product recommendation compared to ecolabels in many other
sectors. The continuing development of seafood ecolabels is likely to see, as in
the other sectors, an amalgamation of issues, bringing a range of matters within
the ambit of broader product recommendations aimed directly at price, food safety
and environment-conscious consumers. This is also likely to be a more prominent
development path if there are increasing calls (such as from Rotherham 2005) for
the more explicit linking of ecolabels to clear environmental benefits. Contem-
porary ecolabelling initiatives, including the FSC and the MSC, are singled out
(Rotherham 2005) for their lack of demonstrated environmental benefits (whilst
acknowledging that such benefits may be hard to show because they often take
time to express ecologically and then be detected in measurement systems). Calls
for greater ecological benefits to be demonstrated are actually unlikely to lead to