In an open letter, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) was recently accused of enabling labour rights violations in its certified fisheries.
The authors of the letter [1] are members of the Seafood Working Group (SWG), a global coalition of human rights, labour, and environmental organisations, including Global Labor Justice (GLJ), a Washington-based NGO. The letter criticises ’systematic exploitation and hazardous conditions‘ and calls for ‚urgent reform of MCS’s social policies and certification processes‘.
In its response, MSC rejected these ‚misleading claims‘, arguing that the MSC ecolabel had never made any social claims. However, in the same communiqué, MSC states that certified fisheries ‚must describe measures in place to prevent forced labour, and any fishery convicted of this, (is) excluded from being part of the MSC programme‘. MSC invites cooperation in order to combat the systemic and global problem in fisheries. [2]
In other words, the critics were right. But it is also true that with perhaps 25% of the global catch, MSC alone will solve at best a quarter of the problem. However, the integration of social responsibility into a leading certification system will set a crucial standard for civil society, politicians and buyers, who decide on the rules for the majority of non-certified fisheries.
The idea that a fisheries certification system should focus exclusively on environmental issues and ignore labour conditions, which are an integral part of fishing practices, may have been understandable 25 years ago when MSC was launched; today it sounds outdated.
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And soon it will become unthinkable to certify a fishery that does not do everything it can to minimise animal suffering.
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