Tara Van Hoorn is an intern with the International Marine Mammal Project of Earth Island Institute and majors in Conservation Resource Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is a nonprofit organization based in the United Kingdom and established through a partnership with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Unilever Corporation. The MSC seeks to reduce harmful fishing practices by providing an “ecolabel" certification to fisheries that practice sustainable fishing.
However, the certification process has come under heavy criticism. Marine biologists and environmentalists argue that the MSC has wrongfully granted certifications to fisheries that practice unsustainable methods such as overharvesting and capturing and killing dolphins. Some of the fisheries certified by MSC are known to use large gill nets and bottom trawlers that often capture bycatch (organisms that the fisheries are not directly searching for), including dolphins.
Some of these fisheries purposefully chase down and capture pods of dolphins, causing many dolphin casualties, in hopes of catching tuna. Despite the Dolphin Safe tuna fishing standards that prohibit chasing and netting dolphins, MSC has certified the Mexican tuna fishery that kills thousands of dolphins and separates young dolphins from their families.
Even the World Wildlife Fund, a founder of MSC, has raised concerns about the validity of MSC’s certification. The certification allows companies to label their fish as “sustainable," which falsely promises sustainable fishing methods to consumers. The WWF criticizes MSC’s approval of a sustainable fishing label for the endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna, claiming that this tuna population will take a minimum of five years to recover to a healthy level due to overfishing. The MSC has agreed to provide this fishery with the sustainable fishing certification if they agree to reach a sustainable harvest level by 2025, meaning that the fishery will be falsely labeled as sustainable for the next five years. The WWF calls for the MSC to use a better method of assessing sustainability, encouraging a base of unbiased scientific data.
This is not the MSC’s first misleading certification of sustainability. In 2017, IMMP reported that the MSC gave one of their “ecolabels” to the Mexican purse-seine fishery that chases and kills dolphins to catch tuna. With aircraft and crow's nests, the Mexican tuna fisherpeople find pods of dolphins and chase them down on speedboats in hopes of exhausting them, which causes many baby dolphins to get separated from their pod. Eventually, the fisherpeople capture the pods in purse seine nets. Although there are “backdown checks” that are meant to release the dolphins, many dolphins. are unable to escape and killed in the process.
More than 60 organizations and scientists worldwide, including IMMP, WWF, and the US Marine Mammal Commission, have publicly opposed the MSC’s certification of this fishery as “sustainable”.
A new peer-reviewed report, conducted by a group of international scientists, strongly questions the MSC's certification model. Researchers found that 83% of certified MSC fisheries use large-scale harmful fishing practices like bottom trawlers, dredges, and purse-seines, which are damaging to the marine environment and often result in high levels of bycatch. They concluded that the larger fisheries often use more resources like fuel and plastic - making them even more unsustainable.
Researchers determined that MSC continues to certify unsustainable fisheries to ensure they can achieve their goal of certifying one-third of the world’s fisheries by 2030. Therefore, fisheries like the Atlantic bluefin tuna fishery and Mexico’s tuna purse seine fishery are being labeled as sustainable even though their practices are extremely harmful to the surrounding ecosystems and marine mammal populations.
The Report concludes:
"While the vast majority of MSC-certified catch comes from large-scale fisheries, the MSC’s communication strategy focuses on small-scale, lower impact fisheries. We hypothesize that this discrepancy between MSC-certified fisheries and what the MSC advertises aims to ‘green’ its image with consumers. We further posit that this discrepancy might be the reason behind a perceived gap between its ‘supporters’ —including policy-makers — and other stakeholders that have gradually disengaged or become critical of the MSC (e.g., coalitions such as On The Hook or Make Stewardship Count). ‘Small is beautiful’ and the MSC favors representations of pastoral fisheries in its promotional materials, but large-scale, active fisheries represent the majority of MSC-certified fisheries."
Inaccurate certifications like these allow consumers to feel less guilty about their purchases, believing them to be sustainable. Surface-level band-aid solutions like these have created a consumer market that thinks they can fix the world’s overfishing and climate crisis by simply buying a product with a certain label.
Organizations like the MSC must be held accountable to ensure transparency and that only the best of the best are certified as sustainable. We must focus on structural changes that lower the demand for seafood, to begin with, reduce plastic use, and use alternative renewable forms of energy.
IMMP is a member of the Make Stewardship Count coalition of groups critical of MSC standards for certifying fisheries.
We need to protect fisheries from overfishing and endorse sustainable fisheries, but the Marine Stewardship Council is undermining that effort by certifying unsustainable fishing practices and fisheries with high bycatch of dolphins and sharks as “sustainable.” We cannot allow this greenwashing to go unchallenged. Please consider a donation to the International Marine Mammal Project to support our efforts to protect dolphins and other marine life from drowning in fishing gear.
