Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
aquaculture production for several species, knowledge of consumers' preferences
with respect to aquaculture and aquaculture practices is essential to calculating
benefits and costs of such programmes.
Third, there has been much discussion surrounding the issue of the potential
growth in the number of ecolabelling programmes globally for both aquaculture
and capture fisheries. As the following chapters show, the MSC and GAA are
not the only programmes or potential programmes and approaches. The GAA
currently certifies shrimp farms for best aquaculture practices with plans for
expansion to other species, while the WWF-US is engaged in a series of dialogues
to identify criteria for sustainable aquaculture for several species (see www.
worldwildlife.org/cci/aquaculture dialogues.cfm). Other competitive programmes
may also develop in the future. On the capture fishery side, the MSC is currently
the primary international programme; however, Iceland has discussed developing
an ecolabelling programme and other national and international programmes may
well develop as well. There may be advantages and disadvantages of competing
ecolabelling programmes, but research is needed into the impact of multiple
programmes on the consumer, and consumer demand for ecolabelled seafood to
be able to evaluate the success of any such programmes. There are two key issues:
(a) do consumers necessarily differentiate between aquaculture and wild seafood
in terms of sustainability issues; and (b) do multiple ecolabels cause consumer
confusion? Some of the research presented earlier focused on consumers' trust
in the certifier, but investigated the contrast between government certifiers versus
nongovernmental (or environmental group) certifiers. Expansion of this research
should consider whether consumers would become confused if there are multiple
certifiers in the marketplace, what attributes of certifiers yield the greatest credibil-
ity with consumers/environmental groups/seafood industry, and if multiple seafood
products in the same seafood counter with ecolabels from multiple certifiers would
undermine the incentive of environmental reform by causing consumer confusion.
Nevertheless, the sustainable seafood movement is here to stay. The sustainable
seafood movement currently takes a wide variety of forms, including consumer boy-
cotts, consumer guides, seafood ratings/wallet cards and ecolabelling programmes.
From an economic standpoint, ecolabelling allows the opportunity to reward the
'good players', within the so-called 'bad' species. Rather than label all Chilean sea
bass as bad - boycotting all Chilean sea bass regardless of the source and putting
it on the red list of a seafood wallet card regardless of the source - an ecolabelling
programme provides an opportunity for those Chilean sea bass fisheries that are
conducting sustainable harvests, with a chain of custody that takes out the possibil-
ity of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fish from getting into the market
chain, to be rewarded for their good practices. A boycott of all Chilean sea bass pun-
ishes the 'good players' together with the 'bad players' (Roheim & Sutinen 2006).
Similarly, while shrimp and salmon farming have received a significant amount
of bad press from the sustainable seafood movement, ecolabelling of products
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