The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) has come out on top in a new report commissioned by WWF that reveals poor performance among other assessed seafood ecolabelling schemes and calls for improvements across the board to strengthen their effectiveness.
Accenture’s non-profit practice, Accenture Development Partnerships (ADP) compared and ranked seven fishery certification schemes that use ecolabels on seafood products against a set of WWF criteria that focus on the schemes’ effectiveness in addressing the health of fisheries and oceans.
The MSC is ranked the highest in the ADP report, Assessment of On-Pack, Wild-Capture Seafood Sustainability Certification Programmes and Seafood Ecolabels, with a score of just over 95 per cent compliance to the assessment’s criteria requirements.
The report finds that except for the MSC, the other assessed schemes - Naturland, Friend of the Sea, Krav, AIDCP, Mel-Japan and Southern Rocklobster - do not evaluate fisheries across all criteria to the extent required to support sustainable fishing and healthy oceans.
“The findings of this assessment reveal serious inadequacies in a number of ecolabels and cast doubt on their overall contribution to effective fisheries management and sustainability.” said Miguel Jorge, Director of WWF International’s Marine Programme.
“While the assessment shows the MSC comes out best in class using the most rigorous programme out there, it is not perfect. Improvements are needed across the board to ensure all seafood ecolabels deliver on their promise.”
The criteria used in the assessment reflect best practices for fisheries ecolabelling certification schemes with the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) 2005 guidelines for ecolabelling forming the basis for the criteria. Standards developed by the International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling Alliance (ISEAL) and elements from WWF’s framework for ecosystem-based management of marine fisheries were added.
