SEAFOOD.COM NEWS by John Sackton — March 31, 2014 — One of the biggest issues in the past for the MSC was the unit of certification – and the fact that some fisheries thought by restricting access they could gain a competitive advantage.
However, all the science and management measures needed to meet MSC standards are applied across a fishery, not only to a particular client.
This led to the absurd situation of some sustainable fisheries being denied access to a certificate because another client would not consent; and to the equally poor practice of multiple clients paying to certify the same fishery.
To the MSC's credit, many of these abuses have been corrected, and now certification require that the client open up the certification to others in the fishery on a reasonable cost sharing basis.
In Canada this situation led to multiple certifications in the shrimp fishery in the Gulf. Now, with the five year recertification approaching, these two fisheries – the Northern Shrimp Fishery in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the same fishery in the channel between Newfoundland and Labrador, which is in the Northern Gulf, have agreed to combine as a client group cooperative.
The cooperative effort distributes costs of the assessment and of maintaining the certificate among the fishery clients of the previously separate certifications. Participating companies in Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, and New Brunswick expect to realize additional savings over the five-year life of the second certificate for these fisheries.
The client group for the combined MSC certified fishery includes member companies of Association Québécoise de l’Industrie de la Pêche (AQIP), L'Association Cooperative des Pecheurs de l'Ile and Produits Belle-Baie Ltée in New Brunswick, and the member companies of the Association of Seafood Producers (ASP) in Newfoundland and Labrador. The four shrimp fishing zones in the Gulf of St. Lawrence covered by the MSC certificate are SFA 8 (Esquiman), SFA 9 (Anticosti), SFA 10 (Sept-iles) and SFA 12 (Estuary). The member companies of ASP offer MSC certified GOSL shrimp from SFA 8 while the other client group members provide shrimp from all four zones.
This story originally appeared on Seafood.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.