What certification?

However now, non-governmental, green and social organisations (NGOs) from around the world are kicking. They say that they resist the WWF initiative because of the experience gained during the years of the MSC operation, and the negative effects of the expansion of “industrial” shrimp farming on mangrove environments and on small-scale fishermen and fish farmers.

They see the ASC as yet “another attempt by a big international NGO to formulate some ill-conceived plan to remedy the problems of unsustainable industrial shrimp farming. These kinds of remedies do not involve the local communities and grassroots movements in the process of defining steps to be taken, and therefore exclude those peoples most affected by the industry’s ongoing assaults…”

The NGOs also seem to be frustrated by what they consider “the major flaws in current certification processes”. With respect to MSC, I too have my doubts, which I have expressed several times in this column and in articles elsewhere. In my opinion, a certification process that’s based on any direct financial relation between the certified fishery and the assessing consulting firms is basically flawed. Furthermore, the MSC certification is by its own criteria human blind, for it, apart from the worry about the sustainability of the fish resource, doesn’t take into account under what working, living, and socio-economic conditions the certified fishery operates, and whether any crew-members, fishworkers and other people and their communities are hurt by this fishery. Moreover, the whole process is expensive and hardly accessible to small-scale fisheries and is suitable only for fisheries that operate at a substantial scale and have sufficient means to finance the sometimes quite prolonged (up to one to two years) third-party assessment.

The NGOs, local communities and academics claim that the shrimp farming industry is socially disruptive and ecologically destructive. They believe that this sort of certification is mainly industry-driven, which wouldn’t allow the majority of affected rights holders – local communities and indigenous peoples - to have influence on both the initial process of criteria and standard-setting, and the subsequent individual certification activities.

The NGOs’ opposition to the establishment of ASC ranges from criticising its proposed standards that, allegedly, are “largely based upon supporting an unsustainable, open throughput system of aquaculture production, and not upon a more sustainable closed production approach, indicating that the proposed ASC’s process is aimed in an inappropriate and environmentally dangerous direction”, to a total moratorium on any further expansion of the shrimp aquaculture in its present form.

The actual demand of the NGOs is that before WWF continues with forming the ASC, it enters into “real and meaningful dialogues with affected communities and not just with industry and a few NGOs and academics”. The NGOs insist that without strict social and rights-based standards, any certification is counter-productive to say the least, whatever the environmental and technical criteria required from the shrimp farm operators are. I’m afraid that this dispute indicates a serious discord between the NGOs from the developing world and some social-minded ones also in the developed countries largely organised in a global network, and between what they call “those elite circles that are now forming the ASC” and “big international NGOs”.

For those interested in the background of the opposition to ASC, I’m recommending a book named “Aquacultural Development: Social dimensions of an emerging industry” - a compilation of 15 articles/chapters in two parts – one dealing with industrialised nations, the other with non-industrialised ones. The editors are well known social scientists: Conner Bailey, Svein Jentoft and Peter Sinclair and it was published in 1996 by Westview Press, Boulder, Co., USA. They tell the readers how wealthy businessmen in Mexico have taken over government-sponsored small-scale cooperative fish farms; how traditional almost artisanal and otherwise sustainable operations in Indonesia have been replaced by industrial aquaculture; how large-scale investments in fish-pen enterprises in the Philippines have become detrimental to fishermen and a cause for armed conflict, and more.

Well, aquaculture, of course, is not only shrimp farming. There’s a great variety of fish species farmed and techniques employed, each with its own problems. Apart from farming salmon in floating cages, which is severely criticised by some NGOs and wild salmon fishermen, even the traditional farming of freshwater fishes in ponds has its problems of organic pollution and eutrophication (hyper-enrichment, which causes algae blooms and often lethal anoxia) and of discharging into lakes, rivers and eventually the sea effluents containing antibiotics and other substances used to treat ponds and fish. So why do the protesting NGOs focus on shrimp farming? I think that it is because so many shrimp farms have been set up in mangrove-covered areas, which for the sake of shrimp ponds have gradually led to destruction of mangrove bushes and hence of whole inshore habitats. Moreover, it was the shrimp farming development that brought about very high social costs in the form of displacing of indigenous people, dislocation of small-scale fish farmers and fishermen, and damage to wild fish populations that were dependent on the mangrove habitat for reproduction and perpetuation.

The first part of the book, which deals with the industrialised world, is less relevant to the ASC-centred dispute, because most of the fish farming there is large-scale and can be called “industrial”. Not that it wouldn’t have its own problems with certification. For example, what will the certification criteria be with respect to farmed fish that may be subject to sudden expansion of various diseases that affect salmon in cages, carps in ponds or paint black spots on farmed shrimp? And now, the US FDA (Food and Drugs Administration) decided to allow marketing transgenic salmon that grows twice as fast as the regular ones…which may open a whole Pandora's Box of new problems.