Two new pelagic fishing groups have joined the multinational MSC assessment for North Atlantic blue whiting (Micromesistius poutassou). The Scottish Pelagic Sustainability Group (SPSG) and vessels from Compagnie-des-Pêches de Saint Malo join pelagic vessels from Denmark, France, Germany, Lithuania and The Netherlands to be assessed. Both companies already hold MSC certificates for herring (SPSG) and saithe (Companie-des-Peches de St Malo) respectively. The addition of the two new fleets brings the total catch under assessment to over 100,000 tonnes.
Camiel Derichs, Director Europe for the MSC welcomed the move: “By bringing together a large, multinational group of fishers to bring the North Atlantic blue whiting fishery into assessment, this group has already realised savings on assessment costs and has shown how they are already working together to improve the fishery’s management. The addition of the new French and Scottish fleets strengthens that group and I hope we will see many more fisheries adopting a similar model in the future.”
Getting involved
The assessment is being carried out by independent auditors MacAlister Elliott and Partners (MEP) and aims to complete to include the catches in the 2015 fishing season. Anyone with an interest in the fishery is invited to participate and MEP have already identified 40 stakeholders. Anyone who would like to participate should contact Chrissie Sieben on chrissie.sieben@macalister-elliott.com
For further information, please contact James Simpson, Marine Stewardship Council on +44 (0)207 246 8913 or email james.simpson@msc.org.
The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is an international non-profit organisation set up to help transform the seafood market to a sustainable basis. The MSC runs the only certification and ecolabelling programme for wild-capture fisheries consistent with the ISEAL Code of Good Practice for Setting Social and Environmental Standards and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation Guidelines for the Eco-labelling of Fish and Fishery Products from Marine Capture Fisheries. These guidelines are based upon the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fishing and require that credible fishery certification and eco-labelling schemes include:
- Objective, third-party fishery assessment utilising scientific evidence;
- Transparent processes with built-in stakeholder consultation and objection procedures;
- Standards based on the sustainability of target species, ecosystems and management practices.
The MSC has regional or area offices in London, Seattle, Tokyo, Sydney, The Hague, Glasgow, Beijing, Berlin, Cape Town, Copenhagen, Halifax, Paris, Madrid, Moscow, Stockholm, Santiago, Sao Paulo, Singapore and Reykjavik.
In total, 340 fisheries are engaged in the MSC programme with 247 certified and 93 under full assessment. Another 40 to 50 fisheries are in confidential pre-assessment. Together, fisheries already certified or in full assessment record annual catches of close to ten million metric tonnes of seafood. This represents over ten per cent of the annual global harvest of wild capture fisheries. Certified fisheries currently land over eight million metric tonnes of seafood annually – over nine per cent of the total harvest from wild capture fisheries. Worldwide, more than 25,000 seafood products, which can be traced back to the certified sustainable fisheries, bear the blue MSC ecolabel.
For more information on the work of the MSC, please visit www.msc.org
Source: The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC)