'Sustainable' Seafood Labels Come Under Fire

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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=sustainable-seafood-labels-come-under-fire

About one-quarter of seafood sold as `sustainable' is not meeting that goal, according to an analysis taking aim at the two leading bodies that grant this valuable label to fisheries.

In an online paper in Marine Policy and at a conference this week in Edinburgh, UK, fisheries biologist Rainer Froese of the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, launched a stinging attack on the schemes by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and the marine-conservation organization Friend of the Sea (FOS) to certify fisheries as sustainable. Such schemes aim to help consumers and retailers to support fisheries that are sustainable and not exploited by overfishing.

Both organizations approve certain stocks of fish and seafood to carry their logo, designating these species as environmentally friendly, and both say that their certification processes are scientifically credible. The presence of the logos can result in higher prices and increased consumer demand for food products that carry them.

To assess whether products certified by the two bodies came from sustainable stocks, Froese and his co-author Alexander Proelss of the University of Trier in Germany compared information from each organization with a variety of independent assessments by fisheries scientists and national and international fisheries management bodies. The authors examined 71 MSC-certified stocks and 76 FOS-certified stocks, including species of mackerel, swordfish and tuna, and concluded that 31% of the stocks labeled as sustainable by the MSC and 19% of FOS-certified stocks do not deserve the label.