Former MSC head spills the fish guts on the Alaskan salmon pullout

A former head of the MSC has commented publicly on the pullout from the certification scheme by the Alaskan salmon industry.  He questions whether it is a kamikaze move or a considered action.   He notes that nobody expected a stalwart of the MSC certification scheme to abandon ship at the height of the eco-certification bubble.  

But maybe that bubble is about to burst?   Has the asymptote been reached?  Have the cumulative cases of questionable MSC certifications finally reached the point where the brand is beginning to lose value? 

Brendan May gives us a rare peak into the dilemma that MSC faces on a daily basis trying to play environmental groups off against commercial enterprises.  He recounts the hours spent by MSC figuring out how to kick a fishery out of the programme so Greenpeace and others might stop thinking they were a front for the industry or a satanic incarnation.  But very few fisheries have been kicked out.

The MSC certification of the Canadian longline swordfish fishery a few days ago further weakens the MSC brand.  Despite the objection of environmental groups, MSC has certified a fishery in which, it is claimed, two sharks die are cuaght for every swordfish caught (some percentage of which survive on release) and which causes 200- 500 endangered sea turtles to breathe their last every year.

As environmental groups have been quick to point out, not many people would be happy to sit down to a meal of MSC certified longline swordfish knowing that it comes with a side dish of endangered turtle and shark.

Alaskan salmon processors dump MSC

This is already old news, but it may be instructive to look at the reasons given by the Alaska salmon industry for dumping  MSC after more than a decade, and the response from MSC, now that the fish guts have settled somewhat, so to speak.

Among the reasons given by the Alaskan salmon industry, the Alaskan Fisheries Development Foundation and the Alaskan government, as reported by http://thefishsite.com and other media, is that MSC certification does not, in itself, make Alaskan salmon sustainable.  They consider the salmon fishery to already be sustainable because it meets State and Federal constitutional mandates for sustained yield, a commitment to scientific research and the need serve public good.   

According to http://www.upi.com/ the industry were also frustrated with the increasing complexity of MSC certification.  No doubt cost is also a factor – not only for the certification itself, but also for annual audits and the right to display the eco-label.  Although a non-profit, MSC has been able to fund considerable global expansion over the last decade through fixed annual fees and variable royalties based on how much MSC-labelled seafood is sold, as well as through donations.

MSC has not welcomed being dumped and has been quick to express its chagrin.  It considers that whatever alternative certification and eco-labelling scheme the industry comes up with, it will be inferior with regard to independence, transparency, traceablity and quality, attributes MSC has put forward to establish global brand identity.

Is the Alaskan salmon industry in the vanguard of a swing away from MSC certification? There is no doubt that MSC certification is highly complex and expensive.  Is MSC certification necessary for a fishery to be considered sustainable?

It all depends.  Nations like the United States and New Zealand have clear standards embodied in policy and legislation regarding when overfishing is taking place or when a stock is overfished.  If a fishery does not meet both of these standards then it is, by definition, not a sustainable fishery.  This is typically determined by federal or state scientific stock assessments through an independent peer review process in a transparent manner.  Provided the providence of products from sustainable fisheries is made clear in the labelling by indicating the fishery geographic stock location, scientific species name and capture gear type, the consumer has sufficient information to make an informed decision.

Typically MSC accredited consulting companies do no new analysis in reaching their sustainability determination.  Rather, they piggy-back on the federal or state scientific assessment, adding additional qualitative insights regarding ecological impact of the fishery and governance considerations.  In an MSC assessment a fishery on an overfished stock or a fishery that is overfishing the stock can be granted “conditional” sustainability certification and can carry the MSC eco-label provided it has plans to become sustainable with regard to the MSC standard within a prescribed period.  Thus a fishery can be deemed provisionally sustainable under MSC while considered unsustainable under USA or NZ federal standards.

Does the MSC label provide sufficient information for the consumer to make a wise choice?  Typically it does not.   There are 5 choices of text that MSC provides to accompany their blue eco-label.  None of these contain any information on the geographic stock location of the fishery, the scientific name of the species, or the fishing gear used.  There is also nothing to distinguish fisheries that have conditional sustainability certification from those that meet all the MSC criteria.  Consumers must take the MSC eco-label on faith or visit the MSC website and do their own research to determine these important details.

Marine fish stocks are a public resource and it is the responsibility of governments to manage this resource for long term public good.  Nations like the USA and NZ are well advanced in this regard and don’t have need of third party eco-certification to augment their own legislation, policy and procedures.  They only need to work on improving the communication of this information to the public.  Detailed product labelling, including whether or not the product meets both sustainability criteria (not overfished and overfishing not taking place), would allow consumers to make wise choices on sustainable seafood. 

MSC Sustainable Fisheries Certification Works says new report

In October 2010 MSC announced that it had selected, from the various contract bidders, MRAG Ltd to undertake the first detailed analysis of the environmental impacts that have resulted from the first ten years of MSC’s fishery certification program.  MRAG was supported in this contract by Poseidon Aquatic Resource Management Ltd and Meridian Prime Ltd. 

These consulting companies have recently submitted their joint report.  You get what you pay for so no surprise that the report concluded that MSC eco-certification really works. 

The media release states that this is an “independent” study.  Not so.  MRAG Ltd. is a consulting company heavily engaged in the MSC certification game.  Further, one of the report authors, David Agnew, is a long time MSC insider as Chair of the Technical Advisory Board and is now on staff as MSC Director of Standards.

The study focuses on improvements in eight outcome performance indicators: stock status; population reference points; stock recovery; retained species; bycatch species; endangered, threatened and protected (ETP) species; habitats and environments.

Improvements were purported to have been evidenced over the period commencing with the secret MSC pre-assessment, through assessment and into the certification.

The conclusion from the study was that MSC works.

Erik Stokstad, writing in Science is not convinced. Scoring is subjective and there is no control study (i.e. how did fisheries not under MSC certification progress over the same period?).

While MSC continues to certify fisheries that are data-deficient, clearly not sustainable or which cause unacceptable collateral damage on other components of the ecosystem we, the resource owners, should reserve judgement regarding the efficacy of the program. 

Objections stall MSC certifications of US and Canadian swordfish

Two bids for MSC sustainability certification by pelagic longline fisheries on swordfish have run into objections.  These objections are currently under “adjudication” by an MSC appointed “Independent Adjudicator”.

The two fisheries seeking certification are the North West Atlantic Canada Longline Swordfish backed by the consulting company Intertek Moody Marine Ltd. and the Southeast US North Atlantic Swordfish Fishery backed by the consulting company MRAG Americas.

These consulting companies are heavy hitters who don’t take kindly to obstacles being placed in the way of their clients and they are fighting back.

Moody was acquired by Intertek for US$730 million in March 2011.  Moody itself swallowed smaller Canadian competitor TAVEL Certification Inc. in December 2009.   

MRAG Americas is sister company to MRAG Ltd. in the UK which is owned by Sir John Beddington, chief scientific advisor to the UK Government.  Sir John is not without controversy.  The president of MRAG Americas is Andrew Rosenberg, a post doctoral assistant to Beddington at Imperial College London in the early 1990s.  Rosenberg went on to become the deputy director of NOAA’s NMFS before leaving to form MRAG Americas.  He is currently also special advisor to Jane Lubchenco, Undersecretary of Commerce and Administrator of NOAA.

The objection to the Canadian longline fishery certification was filed by The Ecology Action Centre (EAC), The David Suzuki Foundation, Oceana and the Sea Turtle Conservancy on 20 September 2011.  The objection to the US Longine fishery was filed by the Turtle Island Restoration Network (TIRN) on 27 September 2011 and is supported by Wider Caribbean Sea Turtle Conservation Network (WIDECAST), Oceana, Center for Biological Diversity, Ecology Action Centre and the Animal Welfare Institute.

The objections cite what have become standard concerns regarding the “lowering of the bar” by consulting companies in favor of their clients when it comes to MSC Principle 1. This principle requires evidence of sustainable management strategies that meet the UNFA Precautionary Approach requirements.  Procedural issues with regard to the certifications are also raised in the objections.

More importantly, the objections take task under MSC Principle 2 regarding the impact, and lack of monitoring, of indiscriminate pelagic longline fisheries on bycatch species, particularly those species that fall into the ETP category (endangered, threatened or protected).

Of particular concern are species like Shortfin Mako shark, Porbeagle shark, Loggerhead turtle and Leatherback turtle.  The Committee on the Status of Endangerd Wildlife  in Canada considers Shortfin Mako shark to be “Threatened” while Porbeagle shark, Loggerhead and Leatherback turtles are considered “Endangered”.  Under the US Endangered Species Act, Loggerhead turtles are considered “Threatened” and Leatherback turtles “Endangered”. 

In addition to ETP species the additive impact of swordfish longline fisheries on overfished tuna species is a concern, especially on Bluefin tuna, off both the US and Canada.

As MSC appointed and salaried lawyer Wylie Spicer mulls over both objections, as well as stakeholder submissions and the ardent counter-responses of Intertek Moody and MRAG Americas, before coming to his “verdict” as the "independent adjudicator" under the complicated pseudo-legal objection procedure put in place by MSC, remember what is at stake.

Swordfish and bycatch species are public property and should be managed for our long-term public good, and those of our children and their children.  This includes non-use value such as biodiversity.  If bycatch species are threatened by pelagic linetrawl swordfish fisheries then we are the losers if these objections fail.    

If you like to eat swordfish, remember that there is an alternative to the indiscriminate pelagic linetrawl that you can source.   The North West Atlantic Canada harpoon swordfish fishery was certified sustainable by MSC in June 2010.  It has zero bycatch.

Additional information on the Southeast US swordfish certification objection here 

Should MSC revoke Newfoundland Grand Bank shrimp certification?

Can a fishery be considered sustainably managed when the scientific advice is consistently rejected by the management authority in favour of larger TACs?

Clearly the Marine Stewardship Council and Moody Marine think so because the fishery in NAFO area 3L is still certified.

Since 2009 NAFO fisheries managers have set TACs higher than those recommended by NAFO scientists.  In addition, Denmark in respect of the Faroe Islands and Greenland, unhappy with their share of the TAC, set their own additional quota in several years, a unilateral action allowed under NAFO rules.

The latest incident is the 2011 decision for the 2012 TAC.  Scientific advice from NAFO was that the TAC for 2012 should be less than 9,350 t to reduce the risk of continuing decline.  NAFO fisheries Managers instead set the TAC at 12,000 t which will incur a relatively high risk of continuing decline.

This resource peaked in biomass in 2007 and has been in steady decline ever since based on both Canadian and EU survey data.  The decline is expected to continue under  the 2012 TAC set by NAFO.  Is this a sustainably managed fishery?

BC Dogfish Fishery - Certified sustainable

There are a couple of interesting aspects to the recent MSC certification of the inside and outside fisheries in the British Columbia hook and line spiny dogfish fisheries.

This is apparently the first shark fishery to get MSC certification.  Sharks tend to be long-living, slow-growing, late-maturing, low-fecundity species.  This combination of life-history traits means that they are vulnerable to overfishing. 

A poorly managed commercial fishery on low productivity species like spiny dogfish typically ends up as a “mining operation” and is seldom sustainable.  This seems to have been the case with the BC spiny dogfish. 

The fishery dates back to 1870.  Catches in the liver oil fishery peaked at over 12,000 t for the inside fishery and over 25,000 t for the offshore fishery in the 1940s. 

Although indices of population abundance are not available over this early period, it can be reasonably assumed that the resource was essentially “mined out” in the 1940s and 1950s.  Catches dropped off sharply in the 1960s and have remained low.

Since the late 1970s, spiny dogfish has been fished as a source of food (including fins for soup) rather than liver oil, using longline and trawl gear, with total annual landings averaging about 1,500 t in the inshore and about the same in the offshore.

Scientific survey and commercial catch rate indices of abundance are all from the 1980s onwards, well after the initial “mining” period had ended, so are uninformative about the big decline from overfishing in the 1940s and 1950s.  In 2010 the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) carried out the first attempt at an assessment of stock status since 1987,  This was prompted by the eco-certification bid being made by the fishing industry and a concurrent and pending species-at-risk (of biological extinction) evaluation by COSEWIC under Canada’s Species at Risk Act.  A strange concurrence of events! 

The abundance indices in the DFO assessment showed no clear trends and did not support the fitting of a mathematical population model to the data.  Conclusions were therefore drawn from expert opinion and subjective evaluation.  The assessment did not conclude that the fishery was sustainable, but rather that “There is no immediate conservation concern”.  Given no evidence of a recovery from the decline that must have occurred in the 1940s and 1950s from overfishing, it seems likely that the population remains in a depleted state.

MSC eco-certification begun under contract to the consulting company TAVEL in 2008.  TAVEL was taken over by Moody Marine Ltd part way through the assessment.  Moody initially indicated they would apply the default assessment approach.  This requires quantitative estimates of stock size and the impact of the fishery under Principle 1 of the MSC process.  However, when Moody realized in 2010, based on the new DFO stock assessment, that the data were sparse and uncertain, they switched to the so-called “Risk Based Framework” (RBF) for evaluating Principle 1. 

RBF was introduced by MSC in 2009 to enable scoring of fisheries in data deficient situations, particularly for the “outcome” performance indicators associated with Principles 1 and 2.  

MSC states on its website that “The first years of MSC certification have shown that the strong focus on quantitative data, to prove a fishery is operating sustainably, can make it difficult for smaller and more traditionally operated fisheries to become MSC certified. This is particularly true for, but not limited to, small-scale and Developing World fisheries.”     

The last sentence is particularly pertinent.  Application of an RBF type approach to artisanal fisheries in underdeveloped countries which have a history of supporting small catches (thus proving the fishery to be sustainable) seems justified.  It would be unfair to discriminate in the market place against such fisheries because they are unable to meet the quantitative criteria applied in a standard quantitative MSC assessment of stock status and impact of the fishery. 

Should RBF also be used for industrial scale commercial fisheries in developed countries such as Canada which have access to government research programs and modern methods of data collection and analysis?  Some would argue that data deficiency in such a fishery would be reason enough for it to fail a sustainability assessment. Under “reversal of burden of proof” the fishery is guilty until proven innocent.  At best, RBF, by its nature, can only provide weak evidence that a fishery is sustainable.  It can’t make up for the lack of data and quantitative analysis.   

Two methods are applied in the MSC RBF approach: a system based on expert judgment (Scale Intensity Consequence Analysis- SICA), and a semi-quantitative analysis to assess potential risk (Productivity Susceptibility Analysis - PSA).  SICA is based on the structured collection of qualitative information from a diverse group of stakeholders. 

Similar subjective risk-based approaches have been around for a while but have always remained on the periphery of the scientific evaluation and management of fisheries.  They are generally considered useful in a first-pass or triage approaches to select priority high risk cases for more comprehensive scientific analysis. Generally they are used to identify “near death” cases, not  the“healthy” ones. 

In the case of BC spiny dogfish, RBF was applied to MSC Principle 1: “A fishery must be conducted in a manner that does not lead to over-fishing or depletion of the exploited populations and, for those populations that are deplete the fishery must be conducted in a manner that demonstrably leads to their recovery.”

When RBF is applied to MSC Principle 1, the focus is on the performance indicator PI 1.1.1 which has to do with stock status.  Other PIs under Principle 1 are either automatically given a passing score of 80 or are not applied in the scoring, except one.  This PI, “stock rebuilding”, is only scored if “stock status” is given a score of 80 or more but will be noted under “conditions” in the assessment document if the score for the first PI is less than 80.

Both the inside and outside stocks of spiny dogfish achieved scores of 80 for SICA but only 68 for PSA leading to conditions being place on the sustainability certification.  Under MSC rules, a fishery is only eligible to use the RBF for PI 1.1.1 in subsequent MSC assessments if the MSC scores resulting from both the SICA and PSA analyses are 80 or greater.  This means that RBF may not be used for any subsequent MSC certifications for the BC spiny dogfish fishery.  They have used their "get out of jail free card".  

The conditions placed on the BC spiny dogfish certification require that measures be put in place that will reduce the RBF risk score for PI 1.1.1 within the current certification and that by the time of reassessment in 5 yrs there needs to be a direct measure of stock status that can be compared with biologically based reference points.

To sum up, MSC has certified a fishery on a species with a life history that makes it vulnerable to overfishing, on a population that is probably still depleted from historic overfishing, and in the absence of a quantitative estimate of stock and acceptable harvest levels. 

RBF cannot be used in the next assessment of the stock in 5 yrs time according to MSC's own rules.  Unless new surveys and additional research are initiated by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans or the stakeholders, this certification will have been premature and temporary.  It will not build public confidence in the MSC eco-label for sustainable fisheries.

MSC Surveillance Report - South African Hake Trawl Fishery

The first MSC surveillance audit for the recently certified (2010) South African Hake trawl fishery has been completed by Moody Marine Ltd. and the report is now available on the MSC website.

The assessment is for both the inshore hake fishery on Mercluccius capensis, and the offshore fishery on Merluccius paradoxus.  The offshore fishery is the more important of the two but this stock has been in a severely depleted state since the early 1970s as a result of overfishing. 

Although fisheries on both stocks obtained a score of more than 80 under each of the three MSC principles, a condition was placed under Principle 1 for the offshore hake fishery.  This condition required that there should be improvements in stock status showing trends of recovery.

The Moody Marine team based their audit on the latest assessment by MARAM (Marine Resource Assessment and Management Group).  This is the consulting company contracted by the South African government to do the assessments and develop the management strategy. 

The latest MARAM assessment is not consistent with a recovery trend in spawner biomass for the offshore stock.  Spawner biomass is only at about 60% of the estimated BMSY management target and female spawning biomass has recently shown a declining trend. 

 The Moody team suggested that the continuing low spawner biomass indicated the need to develop a new, more effective, management strategy but concluded that there was nevertheless enough evidence that a recovery was underway for the fishery to pass the audit. 

It should be noted that this stock has been managed under various different management strategies (locally called operational management procedures) developed by MARAM since 1991, but all of them have proved to be ineffective in rebuilding the stock.

The certification of the South African offshore hake fishery as sustainable by MSC in 2010 and the passing of the first surveillance audit by Moody in 2011 is misleading.  Consumers should not be fooled by the MSC eco-label applied to products from this fishery.  These products are not from a sustainably managed fishery.  South African offshore hake remains severely depleted, there is no sign of significant recovery, and the current management procedure appears to be flawed and needs to be replaced by one that may be more effective.