Sustainable Seafood: Who Can You Trust?
September 5th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Posted in Sustainability
Conservationists say Marine Stewardship Council is conflicted
Consumers depend on reputable ratings agencies to tell them which varieties of finfish and other seafood can be sustainbly caught and eaten. So what happens when one of the biggest of those ratings agencies is found to have a conflict of interest?
A group of prominent conservationists have called into question the legitamacy of the Marine Stewardship Council, which charges fisheries a fee to evaluate them and potentially grace them with its stamp of approval for following sustainable practices.
“Objections to MSC certifications are growing. Scores of scientists (including ourselves) and many conservation groups, including Greenpeace, the Pew Environment Group and some national branches of the WWF, have protested over various MSC procedures or certifications,” the scientists write in the journal Nature. “We believe that, as the MSC increasingly risks its credibility, the planet risks losing more wild fish and healthy marine ecosystems.”
The council was founded in 1995 by the World Wildlife Fund and Unilever, with the aim of helping consumers to choose fish that had been harvested responsibly, reports the New York Times. Under the council’s system, third-party contractors charge the fisheries a fee of $20,000 to more than $100,000 to assess them and recommend whether they should be certified. The council then acts.
But scientists say the system “creates a potential financial conflict of interest, because certifiers that leniently interpret existing criteria might expect to receive more work and profit from ongoing annual audits.”
The Climate Progress blog published a graph purporting to show that the number of fisheries the stewardship council certified as sustainable skyrocketed after Wal Mart, the world’s largest retailer, agreed to sell only MSC-certified fish in its stores.
One of the more controversial MSC decisions was to certify certain Patagonian Toothfish (Chilean sea bass) fisheries in the South Atlantic as “sustainable.” Whole Foods carries that fish with the MSC label. Other fisheries the MSC has certified have subsequently crashed.
What’s a consumer to do? Well I, for one, will no longer be looking to the Marine Stewardship Council for advice on which seafood to eat. And my advice to readers is to stick with a non-commercial rating agency such as the Monterey Bay Seafood aquarium’s Seafood Watch program.
Wow, that’s seriously upsetting.
If you have a smartphone, there is a Seafood Watch app that makes it easy to look up fish when you’re out…like at a restaurant or the grocery store. It’s got more types of fish listed with more detail than the little wallet-sized brochure.
This is clearly a huge problem.
I’m a big believer with these things that customer confusion leads to apathy. If we end up with a weakened “good practice badge” and 2 or 3 “better practice still badges” then my concern would be a large chunk of joe public will at best not know the difference and at worst ignore the lot and buy something with no cert. This leads me to think the best solution here is for MSC to address the issue itself. Can we hope for such a thing?
All good comments above. In my small world I have noticed a slow turn toward folks being educated consumers. Folks I know are becoming aware and want to know what is happening to the food they eat. There are people that don’t care what they eat and then there are those that do. The ones that care want the kind of information you point out in this post. It is a real eye opener. — barbara