Concern is rising among some environmentalist groups over the MSC eco-label turning lax.
The ten-year old London-based Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) scheme today comprehends almost 60 fisheries that have been certified to be sustainable, with a further more than 100 in the process of being assessed. For instance, the cooperation between the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and seafood giant Unilever results in €1 billion of approval-stamped business annually.
However, several environmental and consumer organisations have recently vented fears that the MSC label, granted after assessments done by independent commercial firms and paid for by the applicants, has been put on seafood products far from sustainably produced.
One of the first fisheries to be certified, in 2001, was the New Zealand hoki, popular both with McDonald’s as “Filet of Fish” and Scandinavian consumers as a replacement for the threatened Baltic and North Sea cod.
Right after 2001, the hoki stocks crashed, with quotas reduced from 250,000 tonnes to a mere 90,000 tonnes in 2007. Those reductions were cited as pre-emptive and signs of good management by the hoki industry, but some conservationists claim that this is rather a sign that assessments of what is sustainable have been problematic.
A similar controversy surrounds the Alaskan pollock, the most common source for the immensely popular British “fish fingers”. This MSC-certified fishery is worth more than €650 million annually, but the populations appear to have halved in the last five years, and the quotas were lowered by almost 20 percent last year.
“Economic pressures to keep on fishing at such high levels have overwhelmed common sense”, Jeremy Jackson of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego commented to The Times newspaper.
Objections from outside sources to applications, e.g. from environmental groups, are sometimes made during the certification process, but so far has no such objection ever led to a rejection. Only one fishery — for lobsters, in British waters — has been turned down after an assessment has been paid for. The fact that the applicants pay commercial firms to do the assessments raise doubts about the fairness and the objectivity of the process, leaving the door open, according to critics, to “special arrangements”. The fee for the evaluations usually ranges between €10,000 – 80,000.
A representative of Moody Marine International, a company that makes about one half of all MSC evaluations globally, confirms to The Times that most pre-assessments today lead to full certifications in the end, and adds: “I wouldn’t say they’ve all come out smelling of roses … Each fishery has some area of weakness”.
“In theory certification is a great idea, but this scheme has never fulfilled its potential,” said Barry Weeber of the global Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. “The bar has always been set far too low.”