Ecolabelling of Seafood: The Basic Concepts - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 18

unscrupulous operators or where tuna is intended for non-discerning markets. It
is unclear, for example, how the distant-water fleets of various island nations fish-
ing in both sovereign and international waters of the South Pacific ensure that only
dolphin-safe procedures are used in catching tuna destined for the US market. There
are few independent checking systems (such as independent observer programmes
on fishing vessels) in some parts of the world, and so given the commercial in-
centives, it is entirely possible that tuna fishing continues to have some level of
dolphin impacts in some regions of the world. The broad-scale prohibition on the
use of purse-seine nets to deliberately target tuna and dolphin aggregations has
nonetheless probably resulted in a major reduction in dolphin mortalities in the
eastern Pacific Ocean (http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/ia/intlagree/aidcp.htm).
The evolution of the dolphin-safe label has been tortuous, and some argue that
in the process of expanding the label to encompass more of the tuna fisheries,
the standard required of a 'dolphin-safe' fishing operation has been reduced (Teisl
et al . 2002). The influence of industry forces and the international trade issues ap-
pears to have resulted, in 2005 (http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/ia/intlagree/aidcp.htm),
in a US government proposal to redefine the dolphin-safe standard based on a
more relaxed definition of acceptable fishing practices (www.ictsd.org/biores/03-
01-23/story1.htm). The US government's 'dolphin-safe' ecolabel currently does
not permit the use of dolphin-encircling nets (http://dolphinsafe.gov/ttvp.htm) and
there is a random sampling programme to confirm that all canned tuna sold in
the US conforms to this requirement, irrespective of which form of ecolabel the
cans may carry. The original form of the dolphin-safe label (www.earthisland.org/
dolphinSafeTuna/) and others (e.g. the Flipper Seal of Approval - www.earthtrust.
org/fsa.html) appear to have established higher standards and more assurance for
consumers. So today it is not entirely clear what the generic dolphin-safe label stands
for, nor how consumers can be reassured that all tuna that is labelled 'dolphin-safe'
is caught with only minimal impact on dolphin populations. Given this variety of
different standards, now consumers need to be very well informed about the details
of each specific form of the dolphin-safe ecolabel in order to choose tuna caught in
a manner most friendly to dolphin populations.
Some of the many different ecolabels applying to seafood in the global market-
place are shown in Appendix 1.1.

1.5 Ecolabelling governance

Ecolabels, ratings and buying guides for seafood are voluntary market-based incen-
tive systems, and there is no overall global governance system in place to manage
such systems or to provide frameworks leading to uniformity of structure, function
or probity and accountability. There are several umbrella systems that have been
designed to set the overall parameters for ecolabelling and certification systems
more generally for a range of products and services outside seafood, which