A step towards certifying the Canadian sockeye salmon fishery has been another target for criticism of the MSC eco-labelling process.
Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification of that fishery in British Columbia as ecologically sustainable is “corporate eco-fraud”, said Vicky Husband, a senior adviser to the Watershed Watch Salmon Society. “Its credibility will be lost to its consumers and markets.”
According to Tyee, a Canadian online magazine, the MSC announcement comes in a year when Fraser River sockeye returns collapsed from an expected 10 million fish to around a million, a collapse the federal Canadian prime minister has ordered an inquiry into.
“The MSC should at least withhold its certification until after the inquiry is complete”, Husband remarked.
After nine years’ MSC investigation, the public now has 15 days to raise objections, she claimed, adding that as she saw it, certification seemed to be a done deal already.
Her criticism echoes that from many recent cases where claims have been made that the process of applicants paying commercial firms to do the assessments makes the MSC eco-label less than ecologically relevant. Over the ten years MSC has been operating, no objection from outside groups during the certification process has ever led to a rejection, and only one fishery overall — for lobsters, in British waters — has been turned down after an assessment has been paid for.
A recent study commissioned by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) found however the MSC label better than any other certification system, living up to 95 percent of the demands mentioned by the WWF. Other eco-labelling systems, including Natureland, Friends of the Sea, and the Swedish KRAV label, fared much worse in the study, filling only 26-65 of the criteria set up.
KRAV has later replied that while the study provided some hints how they could improve its methods, the WWF had partly based its study on incomplete and outdated information on KRAV’s English website.