Marine "Stewardship" Council Preparing To Label Longlining For Vanishing Bluefin As "Sustainable"
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Despite high mercury contamination, the bluefin make the best sushi money can buy. These sublime beings fetch such an exorbitant price that they have shrunk significantly in size and number since the advent of the global sushi economy in the 1970s. In a word, endangered. The bluefin’s sky-high valuation creates the conditions for black markets to proliferate. A 2018 Europol report revealed that the volume of the illegal trade in eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna was double the legal one, despite multilateral investment since 2011 in electronic traceability programs to stop pirate fishing. To make matters worse, a warming ocean, increasingly plastic and acidic, portends a precarious future for giant tuna.
And yet, in early June, the MSC might certify as sustainable what appears to be, at first glance, a negligible sliver of the bluefin tuna fishery in the eastern Atlantic: two applications by French and Japanese longliners, which use gear long-known for generating some of the world’s worst by-catch, from sharks to turtles to marine mammals. Green-lighting even one or two boats capturing Atlantic bluefin will set a dangerous precedent and invite the entire suite of bluefin tuna fisheries to appear sustainable to consumers.
For the MSC to even consider certifying a fish that’s endangered, overexploited, mismanaged, pirated, polluted, and smaller than ever before as a best choice in seafood is baffling. But on closer look, it’s not surprising. Leading scientists have shown that the MSC has conflicts of interest baked into its not-for-profit business model. Three-quarters of MSC’s income comes from the logo licensing fees associated with the fisheries it certifies. Of these fisheries, 93 percent are large-scale industrial vessels (over 12 meters). Small operators in poor countries they are not, even though the MSC likes to market itself this way, a recent study has found. Financial obstacles to certification are significant; each certification costs as much as US $120,000 and must be renewed every five years. Under these conditions, a 2016 study has demonstrated that, as the MSC retains and increases market access for producers, the added value alleged from standardization creates monopoly-like conditions as wealth from fisheries concentrates in the hands of a few.
Most recently, MSC’s cofounder—the conservation group World Wildlife Fund (WWF)—formally objected to the bluefin certification proposal. Like Frankenstein’s monster, WWF’s original vision of the MSC has gone awry, and in its place is a fisheries certification that WWF has blasted for its “lack of impartiality,” raising “a red flag” about predetermined outcomes. WWF warned that MSC certification of Atlantic bluefin tuna would provide dangerous incentives to the market and mislead buyers.
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https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/sustainable-bluefin-tuna-not-so-fast/