Certification of aquaculture: One of thestrategies to sustainable seafoodproduction5 September 2013

Certification of products from aquatic farming -aquaculture – is contributing to sustainableproduction, but it also has serious limits. Thereforeit should be seen as one approach among manyfor steering aquaculture toward sustainability. Thisis argued by an international team of researchersin a paper published in Science on September 6,2013.

Aquaculture is one of the fastest growing globalfood production systems, and now contributesaround 13% of world animal-protein supply. Itprovides almost half of the world's supply ofseafood. The rapid expansion of the sector hascome with a wide range of concerns about theenvironmental and social impact of aquaculture. Inresponse, NGO-led certification schemes, such asthe Dutch based Aquaculture Stewardship Council(ASC), have developed standards against whichthe environmental and social performance ofaquaculture can be measured.

Based on the work of an international network ofresearchers, the paper argues that aquaculturecertification has limits as a means of governingsustainable production. Aquaculture certification islimited in the volume of global production it cancertify, given market demand for certified seafoodis currently limited to the US and EU while themajority of seafood consumption occurs in othermarkets. The impact of certification is also limitedin reaching wider sustainability goals, it is focusedon the farm-level instead of the cumulative impactsof multiple farms in one location on the surroundingenvironment or farming communities. Furthermoreit is limited in its ability to include stakeholders,particularly smallholder producers, in the GlobalSouth where the vast majority of global productioncomes from.

The implication of these limits is that certification

needs to be seen as but one of a wider array ofstrategies for regulating sustainable production.Assumptions that countries in the Global South areunwilling or incapable to regulate aquaculture nolonger holds true everywhere. Many of thesecountries have experience with international foodsafety regulation and represent some of the mostimportant domestic markets for aquacultureproducts globally. Certification should therefore beseen as part of a broader array of governanceapproaches for promoting sustainable aquacultureproduction. Global certification also needs to bettercomplement national level sustainabilityprogrammes. Further research is needed todetermine what kind of hybrid forms ofenvironmental governance can be developed thatmove beyond an overemphasis on certification, andinstead draw on the strength of states, the privatesector and institutions such as the ASC.

Certification volume

Only a 4.6% of the global aquaculture production iscurrently certified. The 13 main species currentlycovered by the ASC currently account for 41.6% ofthe worldwide aquaculture production, leaving58.4% of aquaculture production with noopportunity for certification. The recent introductionof two additional certification labels for multispeciesstandards has expanded the potentially certifiablevolume to 73.5%. In practice, however, the newstandards will only lead to an increase of 0.1% incertified volume because much of what ispotentially certifiable is produced in countries likeChina with little demand for sustainability certification.

More information: S. R. Bush, B. Belton, D. Hall,P. Vandergeest, F. J. Murray, S. Ponte, P.Oosterveer, M. S. Islam, A. P. J. Mol, M. Hatanaka,F. Kruijssen, T. T. T. Ha, D. C. Little, R.

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Kusumawati. Certify Sustainable Aquaculture? Science Vol. 341: 1067-1068, 6 September 2013.

Provided by Wageningen UniversityAPA citation: Certification of aquaculture: One of the strategies to sustainable seafood production (2013,September 5) retrieved 2 May 2018 from https://phys.org/news/2013-09-certification-aquaculture-strategies-sustainable-seafood.html

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