In an opinion piece in the current issue of Nature magazine, six leading scientists claim that the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), the world’s most established eco-labelling system for seafood, is “rapidly failing on its promise”.
“We believe that, as the MSC increasingly risks its credibility, the planet risks losing more wild fish and healthy marine ecosystems”, write Professor David Pauly of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and five other North American experts.
Established in 1997 by Unilever and the World Wide Fund for nature (WWF), the MSC has in recent years met a raising wave of criticism for certifying fisheries that some experts claim are less than sustainable.
One point in that critique – brought up again in the op-ed article in Nature – has been that the process of applicants themselves paying commercial firms to do the assessments implies a possible conflict of interest. In fact, 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.
The objections come at a cost, as well, even though the maximum fee has recently been lowered from €18,000 to €6,000. The objection is then handled by a lawyer, rather than a scientist, seeing the case through from a bureaucratic, rather than a biological, perspective.
The certification rate has boomed in the latest years, as commercial interest in the scheme has risen, the article in Naturepoints out: in 2006, the giant North American Wal-Mart chain pledged to sell only MSC-certified wild-capture fish in its North American market by 2010. Today, MSC certifications cover 6.3 million tonnes of seafood per year.
One questionable MSC certification mentioned by Pauly and his colleagues is that of the US trawl fishery for pollock in the eastern Bering Sea, at an annual catch of 1 million tonnes the world’s biggest MSC-certified fishery. It was certified in 2005 and recommended for re-certification this summer despite the fact that the spawning biomass of the stock fell by 64 percent between 2004-2009.
“This can be turned around only if the MSC creates more stringent standards, cracks down on arguably loose interpretation of its rules, and alters its process to avoid a potential financial incentive to certify large fisheries”, the six experts say.