Marine Council’s ‘Eco-Labeling’ Process Is Too Lenient, Report Says

The process by which the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certifies seafood as sustainable is too lenient and discretionary, allowing for “overly generous interpretations” from third-party certifiers and adjudicators, a new report says. Launched in 1997, the UK-based MSC administers a well known eco-labeling process to inform consumers which fisheries are sustainable and provide incentives for better fisheries management. But in an analysis of 19 formal complaints against the council, a group of researchers found that several of the fisheries that received the MSC’s “sustainable” label — accounting for 35 percent of labeled seafood — apparently do not meet the council’s standards. For example, they found that Canada’s longline fishery for swordfish resulted in an extraordinary amount of incidental bycatch of other species, with the annual catch of 20,000 swordfish also netting 100,000 sharks, 1,200 endangered loggerhead turtles, and 170 leatherback turtles, according to the report, published in the journal Biological Conservation.