October 28, 2015 — Recently, the Global Seafood Sustainability Initiative (GSSI) released its new seafood sustainability benchmarking tool to evaluate fisheries around the world. Working closely with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the GSSI developed the tool to better decipher the multitude of sustainability certification schemes that exist (e.g. MSC, Monterey Bay Seafood Watch). However, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), who had been involved in the GSSI development process, withdrew some support when they issued statements last week criticizing the GSSI of not fully examining certification methods and thus not fully evaluating fisheries and aquaculture. WWF also claims GSSI does not consider social issues (e.g. working conditions, slavery) when evaluating a fishery.

Comment by Ray Hilborn, University of Washington (@hilbornr)

Where is the science in seafood sustainability and certification?

It is about money and values – science has been largely lost

Seafood sustainability is again in the news as the Global Seafood Sustainability Initiative (GSSI) released its tool for evaluating the sustainability of fisheries. The GSSI tool has drawn immediate criticism from World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as they recently published an article titled, “GSSI compliance does not indicate sustainability certification, WWF warns.” This is an interesting development since WWF is on the board of GSSI. GSSI is intended to provide an agreed standard for the wide range of certification and seafood labeling schemes. As their web site says “GSSI is a global platform and partnership of seafood companies, NGOs, experts, governmental and intergovernmental organizations working towards more sustainable seafood for everyone.” So who is right in this case, does the GSSI benchmarking tool tell you if a fishery is sustainable?

At its core, seafood sustainability is about the ability to produce food from the sea in the long term. Put another way, we can ask ‘Are the fishery and its management system operated in such a way that our grandchildren can still enjoy the same production from the fishery (subject to the constraints of external factors such as climate change) as we do today?’

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, whose charge is food security, has been a big supporter of the development of GSSI. For FAO sustainability is about continued food production. During the 1990s when overfishing in developed countries was at its height, many retailers supported seafood certification because they wanted to have products to sell in the future … again a focus on food sustainability. This interest spawned the development of a number of different ecolabels for seafood, of which the Marine Stewardship Council was one of the first. However, the newly emerging seafood ecolabels created their own criteria for the assessment of sustainability without necessarily using accepted standards such as the FAO criteria as a benchmark (although some clearly did anchor themselves to these criteria). While in many other areas of food production there are clearly defined and standards and compliance monitoring bodies, this was lacking for the fledgling seafood ecolabels. This lack of oversight led to the development of the GSSI from a German Government initiative to have clear benchmarking of ecolabel standards.

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