Elsevier

Biological Conservation

Volume 161, May 2013, Pages 10-17
Biological Conservation

Perspective
A review of formal objections to Marine Stewardship Council fisheries certifications

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2013.01.002Get rights and content

Abstract

The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) was created as a conservation tool – intended to provide “the best environmental choice in seafood” to consumers and to create positive incentives that would improve the status and management of fisheries. During its 15 years, the MSC, which has an annual budget of close to US$20 million, has attached its logo to more than 170 fisheries. These certifications have not occurred without protest. Despite high costs and difficult procedures, conservation organizations and other groups have filed and paid for 19 formal objections to MSC fisheries certifications. Only one objection has been upheld such that the fishery was not certified. Here, we collate and summarize these objections and the major concerns as they relate to the MSC’s three main principles: sustainability of the target fish stock, low impacts on the ecosystem, and effective, responsive management. An analysis of the formal objections indicates that the MSC’s principles for sustainable fishing are too lenient and discretionary, and allow for overly generous interpretation by third-party certifiers and adjudicators, which means that the MSC label may be misleading both consumers and conservation funders.

Highlights

► Over the past decade, there have been 19 formal objections to Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) fisheries certifications. ► Adjudicators have upheld only one objection – the objection to the certification of Faroese Northeast Atlantic mackerel. ► 12% of MSC fisheries have received formal objections; by weight, these fisheries represent 35% of MSC-certified seafood. ► Loopholes and loose wording in MSC standards allow for controversial fisheries to be certified.

Introduction

The failure to control the three-way expansion of fishing in the oceans, i.e., further offshore, deeper, and for different species, has led to the serial depletion of many marine fish populations (Pauly et al., 2002). While fisheries regulations aim to control the harvest of wild fish on the basis of target species’ capacity to cope with increased mortality, market-based efforts directed at consumers, such as eco-labeling, have emerged in an attempt to change demand and therefore reduce fishing pressure on overfished stocks (Jacquet et al., 2010a). Market-based efforts are designed to make consumers more aware of marine species depletion and other issues and, thereby, to shift consumer demand from unsustainable toward sustainable seafood and to improve management. The London-based Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) seeks to achieve this goal by labeling ‘sustainable’ seafood. With an annual budget of almost US$20 million, the MSC is the largest eco-labeling scheme for certified ‘sustainable’ fisheries. The MSC allows for objections to certification decisions, and evidence presented during those objection processes indicates that third-party certifiers and adjudicators generously interpret the MSC’s certification principles in favor of certification, which the MSC appears to support.

The MSC was founded in 1997 as a joint project between World Wildlife Fund, one of the world’s largest environmental organizations, and Unilever, which was one of the world’s largest seafood processors and wanted to buy all of its fish from sustainable sources by 2005 (Unilever, 2002). Over the course of two years, a group of stakeholders – including representatives from public interest groups (environmental NGOs and academia) and commercial interests (seafood industry associations and seafood retailers) – designed a set of criteria by which to characterize sustainable and well-managed fisheries. Those criteria became the basis for the MSC eco-label, which is granted to fisheries by third-party certifiers that determine if the fisheries have met them.

In March 2000, the MSC allowed its logo to be used on a fishery for the first time. A 2006 agreement with Walmart, a major food retailer that pledged to purchase all of its wild-caught fish from MSC-certified fisheries by 2011, put pressure on the MSC to certify large fisheries more quickly. According to the Walmart website, 73% of its seafood was certified as of January 2011, including farmed fish certified by a different institution. Recently, US retailer Kroger and Australian retailer Woolworths made similar MSC-related pledges.

Today, the MSC label is the most widely discussed fisheries certification, viewed by many as trustworthy: as of December 2012, a reported 183 marine fisheries were certified by the MSC, although only 141 had data available, accounting for just under 7 million tonnes of seafood per year. An additional 109 fisheries are going through the certification process, which, if successful could increase the total certified catch to almost 10 million tonnes, just over 10% of global reported catch.

The 2011 MSC annual budget was approximately US$20 million (of which the MSC only spent $15 million; MSC, 2011). MSC funding comes from approximately 40 donors, including the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and 30 smaller donors. In addition, licensing fees for use of the MSC logo have become an increasingly large share of the MSC budget, from 7% in 2006 (MSC, 2006) to 49.4% (US$10.2 million) in 2011 (MSC, 2011). License fees are required for companies that wish to use the MSC logo to advertise that they carry, sell, or serve MSC-certified products. Businesses in the supply chain pay to use the logo and the fee is based on the volume of seafood in question.

Certification and audit costs are borne by the fisheries and are dependent on the size and complexity of the fishery; the MSC estimates that most certifications cost between US$15,000 and $120,000. Former annual audits for the large Alaskan salmon fishery, for instance, cost $75,000. Third-party consultants (known as certification bodies), not the MSC, perform the actual assessments and audits to certify fisheries and, therefore, the MSC budget does not include revenue derived from these activities. The MSC annual budget also does not account for the potential cost of objecting to certification (currently ∼US$8,000, and formerly $15,000), which is borne by the objector(s).

The benefits to fishing companies and their marketers making the investment in certification include access to some markets and, in some cases, a price premium. After the MSC certified a US albacore tuna (Thunnus alalunga) fishery in the Pacific in 2007, the price fishermen received increased by 32% (Pope, 2009). However, unlike the organic food label, which also receives a price premium, the MSC label does not directly relate to human health concerns (e.g., through the absence of pesticides). Any price premium generated by the MSC label, therefore, results from the desire of consumers to do the right thing and their willingness to pay for a product marketed as “the best environmental choice in seafood.”

The MSC has established three major principles that third-party certifiers interpret in determining whether a fishery is “sustainable” and may use the MSC label: sustainability of the target fish stock (Principle 1); low impacts on the ecosystem (Principle 2); and effective management (Principle 3). Under each of these principles are numerous ‘performance indicators’ that address specific aspects of the principle, such as the amount of information available on ecosystem impacts. Fisheries must achieve a minimum score of 60 (out of a possible 100) for each performance indicator and an average score of 80 or above for each principle. For any performance indicator scoring below 80 but above 60, the certifier can assign a condition that, if met, will raise the score to 80 over a specified period of time to a maximum of five years. Certifiers have an incentive to be generous in scoring (and indeed, there are instances of flagrant score inflation, e.g., the Faroese Pelagic Organization North-East Atlantic mackerel fishery by Det Norske Veritas). Fisheries not only choose their own certifiers and prefer those companies likely to produce a positive result, but a successful fisheries certification also means future work for the certifier in terms of annual monitoring and eventual re-assessment (Ward, 2008, Gulbrandsen, 2009, Jacquet et al., 2010b).

Stakeholders other than the fishery and certification body may participate in the certification by submitting comments at various stages of the process. If the certifier officially approves the fishery for certification, these outside organizations may file a formal objection to that certification decision. At present, a group wishing to lodge an objection must do so within 15 days of the release of the final certification report. The MSC then chooses an independent adjudicator (from a roster of adjudicators, typically lawyers, retained by the MSC) to review the objection and evaluate whether it should proceed. The adjudicator must determine whether the objection “has a reasonable chance of success” and whether the objector has committed to paying the objection fee. If the objection proceeds, then the certifier and stakeholders have a chance to provide a response to the objection. The adjudicator assesses whether the issues can be resolved between the objectors and the certifier. If not, the adjudicator will proceed to adjudication, which can involve an oral hearing. Many objectors decline the option for an oral hearing to avoid the expense and time commitment required, but one may be required if the certifier or fishery requests it (for further details on the objections process, see Appendix A).

Objectors and certifiers can submit further information before the hearing. The adjudicator then issues a decision, which can either validate the certification body’s decision or take the form of a remand to the certifier to reconsider some or all of the aspects of the objection (stakeholders and objectors may comment on the remand). For an objection to be upheld, objectors must show that there was a serious procedural irregularity and that “the scoring decision was arbitrary or unreasonable in the sense that no reasonable certification body could have reached such a decision on the evidence available to it” (MSC, 2010). Even if all or part of an objection is upheld, the certifier ultimately decides whether to recommend certification for the fishery. An overview of the procedures used by the MSC to evaluate objections is provided in Appendix A. While it is likely that deficiencies in this process have contributed to the some of the problems identified in this article, we focus on the scientific underpinnings of the objections filed.

Section snippets

Objections to certification

Despite the bureaucracy and cost involved, conservation groups and other organization have formally objected to 19 MSC-certified fisheries to date. Many if not all of these groups support the idea that market-based incentives, where properly designed and implemented, can be important management tools. Two objections were filed against the fishery for New Zealand hoki, Macruronus novaezelandiae, and only one of the 19 objections, that to the Faroese Northeast Atlantic mackerel (Scomber scombrus)

Discussion

As the number of MSC-certified fisheries has grown over the last five years, so has the criticism of the MSC process and its effectiveness (e.g., Jacquet and Pauly, 2007, Ward, 2008, Gulbrandsen, 2009, Jacquet et al., 2010b, Marko et al., 2011, Froese and Proelss, 2012, Ruddle, 2012). The third-party scoring process has been highly subjective (Ward, 2008) and certifiers have had too much discretion and too many incentives to inflate scores (Jacquet et al., 2010b, Stokstad, 2011). The MSC

Acknowledgements

The authors thank their home institutions for ongoing support but note that this work was completed with no specific funding. They also thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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