Ecolabelling of Seafood: The Basic Concepts - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 17

also include other factors such as health impacts as well as sustainability issues.
The narrowly focused programmes (such as dolphin-safe tuna - www.earthisland.
org/dolphinSafeTuna or turtle-safe shrimp - www.seaturtles.org/press release2.
cfm?pressID=7) tend to be specific to one issue, and will normally relate to only
one seafood product or a few closely related seafood species. Such programmes
are potentially easier to implement and are more effective than those attempting
to cover all aspects of sustainability. The evidence suggests that such narrowly fo-
cused programmes may have been effective for improving environmental practices
although the extent of such improvements may be debatable (e.g. Brown 2005).
Nonetheless, questions could be raised about other aspects of the sustainability
of tuna and shrimp fishing, and the narrowly focused ecolabelling programmes
probably have little impact on these other issues.
The oldest operating seafood ecolabel is the 'dolphin-safe' label, applied to
wild-catch tuna fishing (Teisl et al . 2002). This ecolabel applies only to fishing
practices that are designed to reduce or eliminate interactions between tuna fishing
and dolphins so as to provide an assurance to consumers that the tuna (usually
canned) has been caught in a way that is least damaging for dolphins. Concerns
about the interaction between tuna fisheries and dolphins emerged in the 1970s and
1980s, when purse-seine fishing for yellowfin tuna in the Eastern Tropical Pacific
was considered by US government authorities, non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) and consumers to be catching excessive number of dolphins as bycatch
(Teisl et al . 2002, Brown 2005).
The US public and government concern about dolphin bycatch led to the vol-
untary adoption of a 'dolphin-safe' ecolabel, according to a standard and criteria
established by the Earth Island Institute, a California-based NGO. This was followed
by government regulation in the US (the Dolphin Protection Consumer Informa-
tion Act 1990) to reinforce the adoption of the voluntary ecolabel for both US and
overseas-sourced tuna sold in the US market. The US regulation required that no
drift nets are used and no dolphins encircled or killed by purse-seine nets in order to
catch the labelled tuna (Brown 2005). Similar standards are now applied to all wild-
caught tuna products, and the dolphin-safe ecolabel is applied to tuna products from
many regions of the world for sale into global markets, even for tuna sourced from
regions where there is only a slight prospect of dolphin interactions. The labelling
of tuna products from fisheries with no history of negative dolphin impacts (such
as skipjack tuna in the UK) confirms that tuna producers have accepted the market
impact of ecolabelling for the purposes of dealing with this specific ecological issue
and the ready acceptance by consumers of this ecolabel in the marketplace (Teisl
et al . 2002).
Almost all tuna are now thought to be caught using dolphin-safe techniques, and
these 'safe' fishing practices are most likely to be well entrenched in the global tuna
fishing industry (Brown 2005). Nonetheless, without ongoing strict verification
procedures that are normally the hallmark of well-managed fisheries, it would
be easy for fishing practices to return to 'dolphin-deadly' ways in the hands of