What a relief for guilty shrimp lovers.
The Marine Stewardship Council has stamped the northern shrimp with its coveted eco-certification as a sustainable and well-managed fishery. The first in Canada.
MSC is the non-governmental organization responsible for certifying fisheries as sustainable. An MSC label on your dinner-to-be means it comes from plentiful fish stocks, caught by a fishery striving toward minimal environmental impact as part of an effectively managed fishery.
But before you crack out your favourite gumbo recipe, the Ecology Action Centre says there’s more you should know. “Overall, MSC is a good thing as it is driving the fishing industry to reform,” says Susanna Fuller, marine issues coordinator. Whew. “But like most eco-certifications, the devil is in the details.” Shit.
The devilish detail about northern shrimp is that it is caught using large bottom-trawling vessels that essentially clear-cut the ocean floor, destroying habitat and killing fish that no human will ever eat: “Bycatch.” Despite what should be an unacceptable impact, MSC scores the northern shrimp fishery’s overall practices as well-managed and well-stocked.
“The ironic thing,” according to Jeff Hutchings, Dalhousie’s Canada research chair in marine conservation, “is that we have a conservation-based council giving the green light to a fishery that is only successful because we over-fished cod by 99 percent and shrimp lost a key predator.” And there’s the rub of judging a fishery’s health by fish populations. Cod is the smoking harpoon that should convict Canada of willfully inept management based not on conservation but on politicking.
Hutchins says cod was an ideal fish for the conservation ideology of the ’80s because scientists had good estimates of their numbers, size and age, and were therefore able to determine reasonable catch limits. The problem? “It’s extremely difficult to cut a quota because politicians don’t like to cut jobs.” That mentality permanently ended the careers of a whole region of cod fishers.
It’s bad enough that elected representatives kowtowed to industry and ignored their own scientists. What’s frightening is that an NGO like MSC might be sporting a very similar brand of politics.
From its inception in 1997, MSC committed to certify high-volume fisheries, including trawl fisheries—a move that instantly cost it supporters, some of whom walked out on negotiations. It has since certified controversial species like the Chilean sea bass—one of the most over-exploited fish in the ocean—and the New Zealand hoki.
The latter was ranked 11th-worst fishery by New Zealand’s Forest and Bird Protection Society. That organization’s conservation manager stated in 2001 that “since hoki was certified by the MSC as ‘sustainable’ the Government has cut the allowable catch by 60 percent because of collapsing stocks.”
As a result of questionable certifications, five large US conservation funders ordered an investigation into MSC in 2004. MSC privately questioned its own credibility and chances of survival as an organization. It did survive to certify the northern shrimp, the largest trawling fishery ever to be labeled sustainable.
By focusing on large-scale, high-volume industrial fisheries, MSC is following the giant ecological footsteps of failed governments. Its certification gives yet another advantage to the large multinational companies that receive about $26 billion of $34 billion a year in subsidies worldwide (according to new research by University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Centre), yet employ only four percent of fishers. They also waste close to 20 million tonnes of unwanted bycatch fish each year, and do most of the damage to oceans and sea life.
Small, independent fishers, who generally use traditional, sustainable fishing practices, are unable to rally the resources and data to campaign MSC for certification.
Politicians might enjoy passing the blame for the fisheries catastrophe to a well-intentioned NGO across the Atlantic. But ineffective (if not harmful) market-based initiatives wouldn’t exist if governments had the backbone to stop subsidizing deep-pocketed Destructicons of the seas. They could instead support locals who run 14-foot fishing boats.
They could also, as professor Jeff Hutchings puts it, “take on a much more rigorous conservation strategy,” taking heed of science over industry. The made-in-Canada SeaChoice education program gives government a handy model based on the most progressive science available. As explained by Fuller, SeaChoice rates the viability of fisheries based on five criteria:
“(1) Inherent vulnerability of the stock (i.e. is it a long-lived, slow-growing species, late maturing…early maturing, short lived species…), (2) stock status, (3) amount of unwanted catch (or bycatch), (4) habitat and ecosystem impacts, and (5) fisheries management regime.”
But until our government (at any level or jurisdiction) makes this shift, keep asking fish sellers where their product comes from, how it was caught and processed and, if farmed, what it was fed. As Fuller says, “Even if they don’t know the answer, questions from customers do get attention and change what restaurants and grocery stores buy.”
This article appears in Sep 4-10, 2008.