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Welcome to week one of my National Seafood Month collaboration with the Marine Stewardship Council. If you missed our project announcement, check out this post for more information about what we’re up to! 

To kick us off, we’re going to be taking a deep dive into the MSC and the MSC ecolabel. I want to launch this campaign by making sure we’re all on the same page about exactly what the MSC is, the work that they do, and address some common misconceptions about the organization. 

What is the MSC?

The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is a global science-based nonprofit that works to end overfishing around the world. They were founded in 1997 through a partnership between the World Wildlife Fund and Unilever, partly in response to the 1992 cod collapse off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. This event shocked the world and brought the realities of overfishing into the mainstream. 

The MSC was founded with a mission to respond to the growing threat of overfishing globally by incentivizing fisheries to become more sustainable.

Through partnerships with scientists, fisheries, industry experts, and other non-profits, the Marine Stewardship Council created two major certifications to improve the way our ocean is fished and drive transparency in the supply chain: the MSC Fisheries Standard and Chain of Custody Standard. These certifications incentivize sustainable fishing practices globally and the use of the MSC blue fish label makes it easy for everyone to identify and choose certified sustainable, wild-caught seafood.

What is the MSC certification?

As mentioned above, the Marine Stewardship Council maintains two certification programs:  the MSC Fisheries Standard and Chain of Custody Standard. The first is an environmental standard that assesses and certifies the sustainability of fishery practices, while the Chain of Custody certification ensures transparency and accountability for seafood companies through traceability requirements.

MSC Fisheries Standard

The MSC Fisheries Standard was developed in consultation with scientists, the fishing industry, and conservation groups and is used to assess if a fishery is sustainable and well-managed, using 28 science-backed performance indicators. The Standard is also regularly reviewed to ensure it continues to reflect the most up-to-date understanding of internationally accepted fisheries science and management. The 28 performance indicators that fisheries must meet in order to obtain certification fall under three Principles that are at the core of the MSC Fisheries Standard: Sustainable fish stocks, Ecosystem impacts (including bycatch), and Effective fisheries management. 

• Sustainable fish stocks. There are enough fish left in the sea to reproduce so fishing can continue indefinitely.
• Minimal environmental impact. Fishing operations must be carefully managed to maintain the structure, productivity, function, and diversity of the marine ecosystem.
• Effective management. The fishery must comply with relevant laws and have a management system that allows it to respond quickly to changes in the status quo.

If you’ve ever seen any of my past videos about the MSC, this is the standard I’m always referring to. This is by far the gold standard in terms of assessing the ecological sustainability of fish stocks. While the standard doesn’t cover some social factors like fair wages and equity, it is the most reliable certification for assessing the sustainability of a fish stock and its surrounding ecosystem. It’s 28 sustainability criteria for certification are rigorous standards that were developed by leading scientists and experts in fisheries. This is why I often encourage my readers to look for the MSC ecolabel as a good starting point to identify sustainable seafood. Even if you know nothing else about the product, you can feel confident that if it has the MSC label, it is an ecologically sustainable product. 

MSC Chain of Custody (CoC) Standard

The MSC Chain of Custody Standard is the MSC’s other certification for seafood companies. The CoC certification ensures the traceability of seafood products carrying the MSC blue fish label. The Chain of Custody Standard ensures that certified fish and seafood products only come from a certified source and have been kept separate from non-MSC certified products throughout the entire supply chain. This rigorous certification puts procedures in place so seafood can be traced back to MSC certified sustainable fisheries. It’s essentially a transparency certification that helps eliminate seafood fraud (including greenwashing and mislabelling) and products from illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing from entering the supply chain. 

If you’re a wine lover like me, you can think of the MSC’s CoC certification like Ontario’s VQA certification. Ontario’s VQA certification tells consumers that everything in a VQA bottle of wine came from a vineyard in Ontario that’s met a certain set of standards. The MSC CoC certification works in a similar way. It essentially adds an extra layer of confidence onto the MSC ecolabel.

The MSC’s CoC certification verifies the source of the product and the credibility  of the sustainability claims made by any company using the MSC blue fish label. This helps to prevent things like fraud and mislabelling by ensuring increasing transparency throughout the supply chain. Eliminating food fraud is one of the important ways to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing that is not sustainable. If you’ve been following me for a while, you might remember that over the summer, I wrapped up a project with SeaChoice and Organic Ocean exploring the impacts of seafood fraud and mislabelling. As that project revealed, fraud and mislabelling can have significant consequences, including negative impacts on sustainability. 

By coupling the MSC Fisheries Standard with the MSC CoC standard, the MSC is ensuring that not only are fisheries being sustainability managed and ecosystems being protected, but that seafood supply chains maintain a higher degree of transparency and traceability to avoid illegal behaviours that might undermine ongoing conservation efforts. 

How do fisheries achieve MSC certification? 

In order to obtain MSC certification, fisheries have to undergo a rigorous assessment, carried out by an accredited independent certifier that has no affiliation with the MSC. 

One of the biggest misconceptions about the MSC is that they certify fisheries, which is not true. While the MSC manages a seafood certification program, they themselves do not certify fisheries. Instead, it’s a third-party program where auditors independent of the MSC assess the fisheries seeking to obtain certification. This third-party process eliminates potential for conflicts of interest and provides the highest level of assurance that assessments are unbiased.

Certification to the MSC Fisheries Standard is voluntary. It’s open to all fisheries who catch marine or freshwater fish and seafood in the wild. So, if a fishery makes the decision to undergo the certification process, they are responsible for finding an auditor and paying the fees. The fees can range from $15,000 – $150,000 depending on the size and complexity of the fishery. Assessment fees are paid directly to the independent auditor, not to the MSC, again to avoid any conflict of interest. These fees can be quite significant, especially to small-scale operators, which is something that I’ve critiqued about seafood ecolabels in the past. The MSC does have some financial support available to fisheries that can ease the burden of the cost of certification. 

Once a fishery has connected with an independent auditor, the assessment process can take anywhere from 8-18 months (and sometimes more) depending again on the size and complexity of the fishery. During this time the independent auditor is assessing the fishery against the 28 performance criteria within the Fisheries Standard. In order to obtain certification, fisheries need to score an average of 80 across all these criteria and no less than 60 in any one. A score of 60 is the required minimum to be certified, a score of 80 is indicative of best practices, and a score of 100 reflects state of the art sustainable practice. If a fishery scores an 80 average across the 28 standards, but has scores between 60-80 in certain categories, they receive what is called a ‘Condition’ and must work on improvements to bring those scores up to at least 80 over a specific period of time. 

All fisheries currently undergoing MSC assessment can be viewed by any member of the public through the MSC website. 

Once a fishery successfully passes the assessment and receives the MSC certification, it’s valid for five years. During this time, the fishery is annually audited by independent auditors and the fishery must continue to show any improvements required as a condition of certification. If at any point during the certification period the fishery’s sustainability status declines, depending on the severity of that decline, they can have additional Conditions placed on them or their certification can be suspended. If the fishery fails to make the necessary improvements in order to achieve the required MSC score, the fishery will lose its certification. All MSC certified fisheries undergo a full reassessment every five years to ensure they’re continuing to uphold best practices for sustainable fishing. 

Have questions? Let me know. We also want YOU to be an active participant in this effort! Throughout the course of National Seafood Month, you can participate in our conversations online by using the hashtag #SeasidewithMSC. Feel free to tag us (@Seasidewithemily or @MSCbluefish) and respond to any of our content and definitely submit any questions that you have! During the final week of the campaign – November 10th – we’ll collect all the questions from social media with the hashtag #SeasidewithMSC and respond to them! 

Check back next week for more details on the MSC certification programs and the MSC’s approach to seafood sustainability! We’ll be chatting with Kurtis Hayne, Program Director for Canada and former West Coast Fisheries Manager, all about how the MSC certification supports sustainable fisheries and healthy oceans.