But this label “Marine Stewardship Council”, with its blue and white logo fish and its “sustainable fishing” inscription, does not guarantee the “exclusion of several practices considered harmful for marine biodiversity.
MSC, omnipresent
Born in 1997 of an initiative of the NGO WWF and the Unilever Group, the MSC label is by far the most widespread, with some 2,300 references labeled in France.
On its website, this label ensures to guarantee “effective management of fisheries”, a “minimized environmental impact” and peaches carried out in “sustainable fish stocks”.
For this, the label has enacted several dozen “scientific” criteria. For example, concerning the state of the stock of fish on the fishing site, it must be at least “highly likely” that the latter is above the renewal threshold. Likewise, the fisheries labeled “should not target” birds, amphibians, reptiles or even mammals.
But the MSC is criticized.
The Ocean Defense NGO Bloom estimated, for example, in 2023 that “83% of the volumes certified by the MSC come from destructive fisheries”.
Its detractors describe the label as permissive. Bloom points out the use of deep water trawling, “hydraulic dredging” or “fish concentration” devices (DCP), among the fisheries certified by the label.
Frédéric Le Manach, scientific director of Bloom, deplores “a label by and for the industry to be able to display the message that all fishing is sustainable”.
“”Indeed, the flirting, a substantive trawl, the DCP, it can be harmful“, concedes Amélie Navarre, director of the MSC France program. The label”Based on the code of conducting a sustainable FAO fishing, which stipulates that a certification program is non -discriminatory“Explains the manager.
Reason why the MSC does not prohibit “no fishing machine, apart from the poison and the explosive”. “We start from the principle that this can be well managed,” she adds.
Few small peaches
“”The MSC label still has a number of advantages: it aligns with European fishing rules, often not applied, this is a first guarantee“, nuance Didier Gascuel, professor of marine ecology at the Agro Institute in Rennes.
But this teacher criticizes the difficulties “access to this label for small fishermen“.
Indeed, to be certified by MSC, a fishery must call on an independent audit and obtain a minimum overall score of 80 out of 100.
“”It is expensive, it’s complicated. However, it is often the small peaches that are the most durable“, Says Didier Gascuel. This dead angle, he judges, leads to a paradoxical situation where”The consumer may have two products in front of him, one labeled, the other no, and where it is the one that is not labeled who is most sustainable“.
Small alternative labels
No label competitions the MSC in France in terms of volumes.
Among the Outsiders is the Sustainable, Public Ecolabel Fishing, launched by Franceagimer in 2014 with 36 criteria (ecosystem, environment, social, quality). But it only covers eight fisheries in France and suffers from an “volume of extremely low labeled products”, underlines Didier Gascuel.
Others are mainly geographic.
They find thanks to the eyes of Frédéric the manach because they are “simple and binary”, therefore easily verifiable. Taking the example of the “Pointe de Bretagne line”, it indicates that “it must be caught in the line, on a specific place”. So “it gives a label that means something,” he greets.
To achieve the objective of sustainable fishing, Didier Gascuel advocates “Alternative or complementary processes to labels, an environmental labeling system for sustainability of fishing products“.
In an article published in the journal Nature, scientists have issued eleven recommendations for sustainable fishing, including “fishing less”, “limit the size of boats”, or “prohibit access to species and the most vulnerable areas”.