BC Spiny Dogfish – Sustainable Fishery or Species at Risk?

Will BC Spiny Dogfish be the first shark fishery to be deemed sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council? Or will it become another species on the growing COSEWIC Species At Risk list? 

MSC accredited certifying body, Moody Marine Ltd, is part way through a sustainability determination and COSEWIC is presently reviewing the extinction risks.

IUCN previously assessed the Spiny Dogfish as near threatened globally.  A proposal by Germany in 2004 to list Spiny Dogfish under CITES Appendix II tabled at a pre-CITES meeting was rejected by European member states.

The MSC assessment process started in 2008 under another private consulting company, TAVEL, which has subsequently been taken over by rival Moody.

Things moved very slowly on the MSC dogfish assessment and on 2 March 2010 Moody announced that it would be using the MSC “default assessment tree”.  In other words, the full-blow sustainability determination with multiple criteria under three Principles as given in “Marine Stewardship Council Fisheries Assessment Methodology and Guidance to Certification Bodies”.

However, once the Moody assessment team started to dig into the available data on this fishery, they found that it was very data-poor.  The last time the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) had attempted to assess the status of the stock was back in 1987, so Moody had very little that was current to work with.  Moody and other MSC accredited consulting companies typically “borrow” extensively from the latest government or RFMO scientific assessment in order to arrive at their sustainability determination.

DFO dutifully commissioned a new stock assessment for BC spiny dogfish held May 17, 2010 in Nanaimo, BC.  The ensuing DFO report, “Science Advisory Report 2010/057 – Assessment  of Spiny Dogfish (Squalus acanthius) in British Columbia in 2010” has yet to see the light of day with regard to the general public.  However, one must assume that Moody got a sneak preview and didn’t like what it saw, because on 8 October 2010 they announced that they had changed their mind and rather than apply the default assessment tree, they are opting for the alternate back-door route to certification by applying the MSC “Risk Based Framework” (RBF).

The RBF was developed by MSC as an alternative assessment approach for data-deficient situations; particularly for Principles 1 and 2 (in other words, the important stuff like stock status, management strategy and ecosystem impacts).  Initially the motivation for such an approach was the idea that the default assessment tree favoured large scale fisheries in developed nations and that smaller fisheries in under-developed countries would be at an economic disadvantage because of a lack of the appropriate information and infrastructure, even though these fisheries might have a track record of being sustainable over a number of years.

This notion of giving a break to under-developed countries seems to have fallen by the way, and RBF is now being applied to fisheries for which there is no excuse for not having a state-of-the-art assessment of the sustainability of a fishery.  Case to point – a British Columbia fishery – one of the wealthiest provinces in one of the wealthiest countries with super-abundant resources to collect the information required to determine whether a fishery is sustainable.

RBF methods are much more subjective than the standard approach under the default assessment tree.  Methods range in complexity and data requirements from a system based on expert judgment (Scale Intensity Consequence Analysis- SICA), to a semi-quantitative analysis to assess potential risk (Productivity Susceptibility Analysis - PSA).  PSA examines attributes of each species that contribute to or reflect its productivity or susceptibility.   Pacific Spiny Dogfish has both a very low productivity and a high susceptibility to fishing gear.  They are long-lived, only maturing at about 35 years of age.  Females typically give birth once every two years and produce around 6 pups after a gestation period of 22-24 months – the longest of any known vertebrate. 

There has been a commercial fishery for Spiny Dogfish in Pacific waters since 1870 with landings peaking landing of over 30,000 tons in the 1940s.  Landings have been much lower, between 5,000 and 7,000 tons, in the Canadian Pacific fishery in recent years presumably because of lower abundance.  The fishery is pursued by both hook-and-line and trawl gear.  Although trawl catches have been relatively stable recently, landings and discards in the hook-and-line fleet have been steadily increasing over the last eight years.  Catch rate and survey trends are either flat or decreasing.  The size of the population relative to virgin levels is not known.  The fishery is managed by quota, currently set at about 15,000 tons.  It is not clear whether this is an adequate measure to ensure a sustainable population in the long-term or whether a more conservative approach is required.

It will be very interesting to see what comes out of the parallel MSC and COSEWIC processes with regard to sustainability vs. extinction risks.  Either way, we need more up-to-date information and a conservation-minded harvesting strategy if the fishery is to be truly sustainably managed such that there is a very low risk of future declines, collapses or even extinction.  

Score jiggling under the MSC process to ensure fisheries sustainability certification?

Do third party MSC accredited Certifying Bodies jiggle scores to ensure a Pass on sustainability when responding to critical public comments, independent reviews and formal objections?

This issue has been raised recently by the Objection to the certification of the Faroese Pelagic Organisation North-East Atlantic Mackerel Fishery by Marine Scotland.  Marine Scotland is the lead marine management organisation in Scotland, bringing together the functions of the Fisheries Research Services (Marine Scotland Science), the Scottish Fisheries Protection Agency (Marine Scotland Compliance) and the Scottish Government Marine Directorate.

The Independent Adjudicator appointed by the Marine Stewardship Council to evaluate the objection, Melanie Carter, posted a notice on the MSC website dated 3 September 2010 outlining a query on the revision of the score on one of the fishery Performance Indicators by the Certifying Body Det Norske Veritas.

In responding to the objection by Marine Scotland, Det Norske Veritas had revised down the score for PI 3.1.1 to 65 resulting in the overall score for Principle 3 going down to 79.9.  This is a Fail under Principle 3 and therefore a Fail in terms of Sustainability determination under the MSC process.

When Melanie Carter pointed out this blunder to Det Norske Veritas they immediately responded “Our Assessment teams did not intend failing the fishery but we did overlook the effect of the rescoring on the weighting table (the total scores). DNV has been in contact with both experts [on the assessment team] yesterday and today. The assessment team wishes to rescore PI 3.1.1 to 70 giving it a total of 80,5.”  

This looks a lot like subjective score jiggling to ensure a Pass.

This brings to mind a previous case of alleged score jiggling under the MSC eco-certification process.  The controversial “skin-of-the-teeth” 2006/2007 sustainability assessment of the NZ Hoki fishery by SGS Netherlands resulted in a formal objection by NZ WWF in July 2006.  WWF claimed that there was “a procedural failure, because the Final Report does not provide enough evidence to show how the assessment team derived the scores for Performance Indicators that were changed between the Public Comment Draft Report and the Final Report.”

The allegation is that in responding to critical WWF comments on the Public Comment Draft report, SGS revised down some of the scores, but to compensate other PI scores, not subject to criticism by WWF, were revised up to ensure that an overall passing score was retained under each of the 3 Principles.

Recall that no fishery that has gone through the secret MSC pre-assessment process into full assessment has failed to achieve a Pass on Sustainability (except for a UK lobster fishery which fell out of the certification process at some point, possibly lack of funds to pay the CB?). Further recall that no public comment, independent peer review or formal objection has resulted in the overturning of a Certification Body Sustainability Determination.  

Seafood stewardship in crisis?

In an opinion article published in Nature 2 September, Jennifer Jacquet of the UBC Fisheries Centre and colleagues criticise a number of facets of fisheries sustainability certification carried out by the Marine Stewardship Council.  They suggest "scores of scientists… and many conservation groups" have protested over various MSC procedures or certifications and that MSC increasingly risks its credibility and the planet risks losing wild capture fisheries and healthy marine ecosystems.

MSC fired back an immediate response arguing that its sustainability standard fully met FAO guidelines and had the support of “over 200 marine biologists, scientists, environmentalists and other stakeholders from around the world.”

To add more numbers to the fray, last year ASOC (Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition) numbering more than 200 non-governmental organizations in fifty countries concerned with the preservation of the Antarctic environment filed a notice of objection with MSC regarding the sustainability determination of Moody Marine with regard to the Aker Biomarine Krill Fishery. 

So, lots of people engaged on both sides of the argument it seems.  There is little doubt that at least some of MSC’s fisheries sustainability certifications are highly controversial and the MSC Board would do well to consider the reasons with a little dose of humility rather than denial.

There are three areas of potential concern – the MSC standard, its application and governance.  The principles and criteria that make up the MSC standard are consistent with most interpretations of what would constitute a sustainable fishery, at least in terms of single species management.  At the ecosystem level MSC criteria are more nebulous, but this reflects the general lack of our current understanding about what ecosystem sustainability means and how to achieve it.

The problem seems to lie with what Jacquet et al. call the “loose interpretation of its rules”.  As one of MSCs own Independent Adjudicators recently put it, the MSC process “leaves a substantial margin of discretion to the certification body in the way in which it sets scoring guideposts against individual performance indicators”.

MSC independent certifiers are seen by some to be certifying fisheries that are not sustainable as conditionally sustainable in anticipation that they will become fully sustainable in order to retain certification.  It is hard to believe many fisheries scientists or others seriously interested in long-term sustainable management of our fisheries think that this is justified.  There may be more sympathy if at least one fishery had actually lost certification for not meeting the conditions imposed by MSC, but this has never happened.  Jacquet et al. suggest that MSC is in danger of diminishing the value of its brand as leading retailers respond to heightened public concerns by requiring higher standards than those applied by MSC’s independent certifiers such as Moody Marine Ltd.  As Jacquet et al. point out there is economic incentive for leniency – “certifiers that leniently interpret existing criteria might expect to receive more work and profit from ongoing annual audits.”

Jacquet and colleagues touch on issues related to the MSC objection procedure.  It is this aspect of MSC governance that is perhaps the most troublesome.  It is run by lawyers retained on salary by MSC and it is a process to ensure that MSC’s own rules have been followed in reaching a determination, rather than to evaluate whether scientific data related to sustainability are adequate and have been properly interpreted.  As such it cannot second-guess the independent certifiers’ assessment of the sustainability of the stock.  This leaves little opportunity for a member of the public, or public groups to derail an assessment on technical grounds related to data and interpretation.  The proof is in the pudding.  No MSC assessment has ever failed to reach a successful sustainability determination and no objection has ever been upheld.    

Needless to say the MSC Board rejects the criticisms of Jacquet and colleagues, claiming that its practices and procedures are beyond reproach.  When some of the MSC’s founding fatherly advisors and early supporters such as Daniel Pauly and Sidney Holt suggest that there are serious problems, the MSC Board would do well to listen, rather than shoot from the hip.

Seabird feathers fly as MSC and Pew face off over swordfish and tuna

In an open letter on the MSC website, Jim Humphreys, MSC Fisheries Regional Director for the Americas, responds to the Pew Environment Group’s recent campaign to oppose the assessment of the Southeast North Atlantic swordfish, yellowfin and bigeye tuna fisheries based in Florida as sustainable.  These fisheries are currently under MSC sustainability assessment by the independent accredited certifier, MRAG Americas.

Humphries argues that previous successful MSC assessments have resulted in significant improvements in some fisheries that have dramatically reduced impacts on other species.

The idea is that MSC certifies fisheries that are not really sustainable, or that have considerable negative impacts on the ecosystem, on condition that they promise to become sustainable and reduce ecosystem impacts over the next 5 years by fixing a bunch of issues.  MSC claims that this has led to improved fisheries management. 

Humphreys picks a strange example to support his claim – the South Africa hake fishery.  The offshore hake stock, Merluccius paradoxus, the major component of the fishery, is in a collapsed state but this did not stop MSC from recently recertifying the fishery as sustainable for a second 5 year period, against the protests of one of the independent reviewers who pointed out as much.

But it is not the management of the collapsed hake stock Humphreys is referring to.  It is the reduction in seabird mortality caused by collateral damage in the hake trawl fishery through contact with the trawl and trawl warps – supposedly down from 18,000 per year a few years back to 200 per year now as a result of MSC imposed conditions on the fishery..

The 18,000 per year estimate is published in a 2008 paper in Animal Conservation (Interactions between seabirds and deep-water hake trawl gear: an assessment of impacts in South African waters by Watkins, Petersen and Ryan).

The question is, what is the basis for Humphreys’ estimate of current mortality of only 200 per year?  The number seems unlikely.

There is another story within this story. 

The president of MRAG Americas, a private, for-profit consulting company, is Andy Rosenberg, former deputy director of the National Marine Fisheries Service in the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  Rosenberg also happens to be a Pew fellow and, according to the Gloucester Daily Times, appointed last fall by Lubchenco as a White House consultant on ocean policy.

Confusing?

More feathers may fly!

MSC slashes objection fee

MSC announced August 2 that it is slashing the fee cap on lodging an objection to a fishery sustainability determination from £15,000 to £5,000.  This sounds like a lucky break for the public who might want to voice concerns regarding some aspect of the sustainability assessment process carried out under MSC.

That is until you stop to think.  A few years ago I paid a fee to my local city council to object to a new property evaluation they carried out on my house.  The objection was heard by an independent adjudicator hired by the city and I had a few dollars shaved off my annual property taxes as a result.  

Like I own my house, the public owns this property, the fish resource.  But, unlike my city council, the MSC has no legal standing.  Why should we pay a group that has not legal standing for the right to object to a wrongful finding related to our property that could well impact its future value in terms of long-term public good?

It makes no sense until you realize that the public are not the client of the MSC process - the industry is.  An objection delays certification of the fishery as sustainable, increases costs for the independent certifier (e.g. Moody Marine Ltd., a for-profit company accredited under MSC standards) and annoys the client.  The fee reduces the number of objections lodged by public organizations and lessons the salary costs of the 4 lawyers hired by MSC as Independent Adjudicators to hear and judge objections.

Perhaps the reduced fee will encourage more public objections to controversial MSC sustainability certifications.  But £5,000  is still pretty steep when you consider what you get.  No objection to a sustainability determination has been upheld by an MSC Adjudicator thus far.

You got nothing for £15,000  now you will get nothing for £5,000 - not really a bargain.

MSC income, was £8 million in 2008/2009 -about half from charitable grants and half from licensing its blue eco-label to components of the supply chain for products from certified fisheries.  The right thing to do would be to eliminate the objection fee altogether.  MSC can afford it, although it may mean putting on hold the opening of a new administrative office in some further corner of the World.

Aker Biomarine krill based profits up

Recently MSC certified as sustainable, the Aker Biomarine profits are up based on products from its krill fishery in the Antarctic according to a report on  SeafoodSource.com today

By SeafoodSource staff 
06 August, 2010 - Oslo, Norway-based krill harvester and biotechnology group Aker Biomarine posted a quarterly profit for the first time thanks to a strong harvest and strong sales of its omega-3 fatty acid-rich products for human consumption.

What price does one put on preserving the Antarctic foodchain? 

Ross sea toothfish objection - a flustered partial response?

The Marine Stewardship Council Independent Adjudicator (IA) responded in part on 2 August to the latest submissions from Moody Marine Ltd and Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC).  The numerous typos are a clue, but there is other evidence that the IA may be becoming flustered.  Perhaps he senses that Ross Sea toothfish is a public symbol of ignorance regarding sustainable fisheries and inherent flaws in the MSC approach?  As a lawyer he must be aware that precedence is being set with each decision he makes.

Given almost no concessions by Moody to his previous remand, the IA now proceeds, step by step, to further dissect, and in some cases revoke, concerns, especially with regard to Principle 2 (Maintenance of Ecosystem), “that that there was a serious procedural irregularity that made a material difference to the fairness of the assessment”.

In doing so, he laments that MSC Fisheries Certification Methodology “leaves a substantial margin of discretion to the certification body in the way in which it sets scoring guideposts against individual performance indicators.  Almost by definition, the circumstances on which an adjudicator could interfere with the exercise of that discretion must be extremely limited.”

This sentiment was echoed recently by another IA on the objection to the controversial Moody Marine Ltd Fraser River sockeye salmon determination when he remarked “Other IA’s, in recent decisions, recognizing the purpose of the OP [Objection Procedure], have described the standard of review available [by the IA to an objection] as being “narrow” and requiring “deference to the determinations of the certification body”.”

In keeping with the narrow scope and need for deference, the IA finds that, although a number of the scores against the Performance Indicator Scoring Guideposts (PISGs) for Ross Sea toothfish appear “generous”, and although Moody has thus far argued against making any revisions based on objections, “I am not persuaded that the certification body made a mistake as to material fact, failed to consider material information or acted arbitrarily or unreasonably in awarding the scores that were given”.

Although the IA again remands several of the Principle 3 (Effective Management System) PSIGs and associated scores for further consideration by Moody, none of these would appear to be “show-stoppers” as far as certification is concerned.  Once the IA has Moody’s response in hand with respect to Principle 3, he says he will then consider the responses to his earlier remand against Principle 1 indicators (Sustainability of Exploited Stock). These do contain some real “show-stoppers”, particularly with regard to the very speculative knowledge regarding the life-history of Ross Sea toothfish.  Will Moody be let off the hook on these accounts too?  Wait and see.