Highlights of special studies
The principles require that any ecolabelling scheme should be consistent with relevant international law and agreements, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Code, and WTO rules and mechanisms. They also require that ecolabelling schemes should be market-driven, transparent and non-discriminatory, including by recognizing the special conditions applying to developing countries. The Marine Guidelines were revised in 2009 to take into account a request by COFI that FAO should review and provide more guidance on the general criteria in relation to “stock under consideration” and to serious impacts of the fishery on the ecosystem. The revised guidelines call for the minimum substantive requirements and criteria of ecolabelling schemes to include the following elements: • The fishery is conducted under a management system that is based on good practice, including the collection of adequate data on the current state and trends of the stocks and based on the best scientific evidence. • The stock under consideration is not overfished. • The adverse impacts of the fishery on the ecosystem are properly assessed and effectively addressed. Furthermore, the procedural and institutional aspects of ecolabelling schemes should encompass: • the setting of certification standards; • the accreditation of independent certifying bodies; • the certification that a fishery and the chain of custody of its products are in conformity with the required standards and procedures. In the light of improved capacity to farm marine fish and the need for increased food from aquatic ecosystems, stock enhancement and the use of introduced species may become more common management interventions also in the marine environment. The Marine Stewardship Council has recently addressed species introductions and enhancements in its ecolabelling scheme32 and developed policy on when such fisheries would be within the scope thereof. Currently, without revising the Marine Guidelines, it would not be possible to assess whether the scheme operated by the Marine Stewardship Council would comply with the Marine Guidelines when assessing enhanced marine fisheries or those marine fisheries based on introduced species. Because FAO is developing benchmarks to assess whether private schemes comply with these guidelines, consideration may need to be given to revising the Marine Guidelines in order to address explicitly the issues of stock enhancement and species introductions. The Inland Guidelines When adopting the Marine Guidelines in 2005, the Twenty-sixth Session of COFI requested that FAO also prepare guidelines on the ecolabelling of fish and fishery products from inland capture fisheries (Inland Guidelines). The Inland Guidelines are similar to the Marine Guidelines in all aspects except for some differences in scope. During development of the Inland Guidelines, it became clear that the use of enhancement is common in inland fisheries. However, there are several different forms of enhancement, and some may be more appropriately considered forms of aquaculture than forms of capture fisheries. It became evident that not all enhanced fisheries could be subject to the Inland Guidelines. Enhanced fisheries are those “that are supported by activities aimed at supplementing or sustaining the recruitment of one or more aquatic organisms and raising the total production, or the production of selected elements of a fishery, beyond a level which is sustainable by natural processes. Enhancement may entail stocking with material originating from aquaculture installations, translocations from the wild and habitat modification.”33 Enhancement practices range from minor interventions either in the flow of water and/or in a flora or fauna, to highly controlled aquaculture systems that release animals into semi-natural environments. Thus, there is a need to define carefully the scope of fisheries eligible for an ecolabel in regard to, inter alia, the relationship between the
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