Ecolabelling of Seafood: The Basic Concepts - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 21

indicative estimates about the likely costs of certification, including the prepara-
tory processes, the compliance assessments and maintenance costs;
procedures to ensure consistency with international, national and community
standards and legal requirements; and
procedures to account for illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and
other illegal activities that may affect achievement of sustainability as expressed
in the standard.
One of the most pervasive and intractable governance issues relates to the matter
of state versus non-state control of seafood ecolabelling systems. When govern-
ments apply marketing controls and set the rules within which private sector systems
must operate, then they usually do so to reflect the best interest of the nation con-
cerned. However, where systems are established that transcend national boundaries
and create rules that have no direct parallels within national or international jurisdic-
tions, concerns may arise about the motives behind such systems and the potential
lack of accountability created by such private transnational control and manage-
ment of natural resources (Constance & Bonanno 1999, Gulbrandsen 2006). This
set of concerns relates to the motives behind the 'gatekeeper' - the controller of the
markets and the health of the related seafood and the ecosystems (Box 1.3).
Box 1.3 Civil Society as the Gatekeeper
Concerns have been raised about the possibility that voluntary non-government
certification schemes, as they begin to exert more control over fishing practices
and the marketplace, may become increasingly capable of subverting the proper
role of national governments in the stewardship of fisheries to secure national
benefits. Steinberg (1999) summarises this in the following terms for the case
of the MSC ecolabelling programme:
The aim of the MSC is to provide a governance scheme in which private certifi-
cation agencies are empowered to certify local fleets as following a sustainable
fishing code of conduct. Processors and distributors who buy fish only from cer-
tified fleets will be allowed to place the MSC logo on their products, and retailers
and individual consumers will be urged to disassociate themselves from fish
products that lack the MSC logo. In effect, the gate-keeping function is shifted
to the retailers and the consumers. These actors then have the responsibility of
requiring participants in the 'fish-provision club' to mandate that their suppliers
conduct their business in a sustainable manner. The MSC facilitates the process
by developing the standard and by accrediting the monitoring firms who certify
local fleets; that is, the MSC sets, but does not enforce, the exclusionary thresh-
old. Actual exclusion is devolved to the retail scale, where it is beyond the reach
of legislation designed to protect free trade.
The MSC approach establishes fish as a 'club good', a form of property that, by
definition, excludes some individuals from participation. The exclusion of certain