Make Stewardship Count, a coalition co-founded by SeaChoice, fears Marine Stewardship Council’s revised Fishery Standard doesn’t go far enough to protect marine life and ocean habitat.
Commonly recognized by its blue tick logo affixed to more than 20,000 products globally, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is the world’s largest and most prominent seafood certification scheme, with over 400 fisheries across the globe certified under its standard. Make Stewardship Count is a coalition that engages with the Marine Stewardship Council to advance improvements in the certification and has engaged significantly as a key stakeholder over the 5 year-long Fisheries Standard Review (FSR), implemented on May 1, 2023.
The MSC Fisheries Standard is meant to provide a framework within which the environmental impacts and effective management of a fishery can be assessed before it can use the MSC blue tick label. Consumers, retailers, and those working in the seafood industry must be able to trust that the label represents seafood caught sustainably and ethically. The Fisheries Standard Review provided MSC and stakeholders the opportunity to set the bar higher and drive real improvements in global fisheries.
Make Stewardship Count produced final scorecards based on a traffic light system to assess the final version of the standard against its list of critical asks and call for transparency. The scorecards, ranking the elements of the revised Standard in mostly red and yellow, reflect that although there are some improvements, it falls below best practice in many other areas.
Early drafts of the new Standard generated optimism, as they included several of the improvements that SeaChoice and the coalition had been calling for throughout the review. While some of these improvements made it into the final version of the Standard, others were removed at the final critical stage of the review, with little explanation or opportunity for stakeholder input. Two such removed improvements include: marine mammal protection from fishing and science-based targets for observer coverage on board vessels. These would have been powerful requirements in the certification.
One of the strongest and most welcome improvements to the Standard, gaining one of the few ‘green’ scores from the coalition is the requirement for MSC fisheries to have a policy in place that sharks must be landed with their fins naturally attached to their bodies, a globally recognized best practice.
Throughout the review process, the coalition challenged MSC to strengthen its requirements for the protection of Endangered, Threatened and Protected (ETP) species and is pleased that MSC focused on designing a significantly improved ETP species designation process. However, the new Standard allows species designated as ETP to be considered eligible for certification as an MSC product by introducing ‘modification factors’. These factors risk undermining designation improvements and are not precautious enough. The coalition worries that this will allow economically valuable ETP species to become MSC certified, despite not being well managed or recovering.
It is impossible to know how and if changes to the Standard will truly impact certifications until they are applied to fisheries over the next several years. Ultimately, the coalition is concerned that the new Standard, which will be in place for at least the next decade, will continue to be awarded to fisheries that routinely catch vulnerable animals, waste excessive amounts of sea life, damage ecosystems and catch overfished species.
Visit the Make Stewardship Count website to learn about their final scorecard on the Standard contents, the Review process and more details about the new V3.0 MSC Fisheries Standard.
