Ecolabelling of Seafood: The Basic Concepts - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 22

actors may be desirable in the interest of systemic sustainability, but such politi-
cally charged actions cannot be endorsed without first critically examining who
is excluded, why they are excluded, and who makes the exclusionary decisions.
In most economic systems, exclusionary decisions are made by the market
according to principles of efficiency or by the state accordingly to principles
of national policy objectives. In the MSC system, the exclusionary procedure
is more complex. Retailers and consumers endorse and empower the over-
all exclusionary process, the MSC defines the precise exclusionary threshold,
and processors and distributors perform the actual excluding functions through
their purchasing choices. This complex division of labour may be necessary
given the nature of marine resources, state sovereignty, and agreements ban-
ning non-tariff trade barriers, but it puts an especially high premium on is-
sues of transparency, democracy, and the individual motivations of each actor
involved.
Whatever corporations' intentions, a system that internalises externalities is
likely to lead to decreasing profit margins and the decline of marginal (or smaller)
producers. Thus, a possible result of initiatives like the MSC is a restructuring
in the industry that it seeks to regulate. Economists may laud such restructuring
as the triumph of the more efficient over the less efficient, while populists may
decry it as unfair to small producers. Whatever the case, such restructuring does
not necessarily have any relationship to the stated aims of the MSC: ensuring
that fish are harvested in a sustainable manner. The smaller firms pushed out of
the market by the MSC may be behaving in just as environmentally responsible
a manner as those remaining.

From Steinberg 1999.

1.6 Sustainability standards

Seafood ecolabelling, rating and guide programmes are each based on a sustain-
ability standard which expresses the ecological sustainability expectations of the
programme in order for a product to carry a product recommendation. If a product
is assessed as achieving the desired standard of performance, it will be permitted to
carry the label (in the case of an ecolabelling programme), rated as a good choice
for environmentally aware consumers, or given a 'buy with confidence' recom-
mendation in a guide programme. If the product meets, or closely approaches, the
standard, it may be given a conditional approval to carry the label or be given a
'buy with caution' recommendation, and be required to carry out remedial actions
within a specified timeframe to rectify any ecological issues that are determined
to be important but non-critical. All decisions about whether a product meets or
approaches the sustainability standard depend on two key attributes of the pro-
gramme concerned: first, the form and content of the sustainability standard, and