We lost a battle in the fight against greenwashing, but it has only made us more determined to win the war.

It is ridiculously hard these days for regular people to make informed decisions about what seafood to buy, especially if they want to use their hard-earned money to support sustainable fisheries and not support mismanagement and overfishing. It shouldn’t be this way, but it is. The fish departments at our local grocery stores are festooned with an array of eco-labels and it’s hard to know which ones to trust. In fact, many of them should not be trusted.

Interception fisheries in Southeast Alaska are one of the biggest killers of B.C. salmon, undermining our ability to restore our salmon populations. Eco-labels that give these fisheries a thumbs-up are helping these dirty fisheries stay in business and we are trying to get them to stop.

Executive Director Aaron Hill

The world’s leading eco-labeler for seafood is the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). You’ll find their famous blue check mark on things like McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish and all manner of “Alaskan” salmon products. They certify fisheries as “sustainable” using an elaborate assessment process that appears rigorous and objective but is biased and easily corrupted.

The fatal flaw in the MSC’s fishery certification process is that fishing industry “clients” seeking the blue checkmark hire 3rd-party, for-profit certification companies to assess their fisheries using the MSC’s assessment criteria. The criteria are dozens of pages long but are written in such a way that the crafty hired guns on these for-profit assessment teams have no trouble finding a way to assign passing grades on every single criterion, and that’s exactly what they do. And fair enough: if you were a fishing industry executive, would you hire a tough grader or a rubber-stamper to assess your fishery?

The MSC also makes a big chunk of their money through licensing fees charged to the fisheries that use their label. Therefore both the MSC and the certification companies have a strong financial motivation for fisheries to get the blue checkmark.

The MSC Blue Checkmark

You might think, for example, that the Southeast Alaskan salmon fishery would be disqualified from getting an eco-label because they don’t report the thousands of chinook, steelhead and other fish of non-target species that they throw overboard every year, dead. They also aggressively harvest depleted B.C. salmon runs that fishers in B.C. are banned from catching in order to help these stocks replenish. But despite this, they are still certified as sustainable.

Earlier this year, when the Alaskan salmon fisheries came up for re-assessment at the end of their 5-year certification, Watershed Watch, SkeenaWild Conservation Trust and Raincoast Conservation Foundation teamed up to provide piles of evidence to the certification company, MRAG Americas Inc., documenting the above and other problems in the Southeast Alaskan fisheries. The assessment team acknowledged our input but explained it away, and gave the fishery passing grades, allowing for another 5 years of misleading consumers.

In response, we launched a formal objection—something the MSC’s process allows for. A so-called independent adjudicator, hired by the MSC, looked at our arguments and ruled that we may have a case. So we submitted a lengthy written argument and even hired a lawyer to help us make our case as strong as possible. Then, in September, we trundled down to Seattle for a 2-day adjudication hearing with the assessment team and industry representatives, presided over by the adjudicator who flew all the way from England for the job.

Earlier this month, the adjudicator came back with her decision. In a lengthy report, she explained why she was rejecting every one of our objections. We weren’t surprised because these objections are rarely successful and she went to great lengths in our hearing (and in her report) to explain that her power to overturn the certification was very limited. She could only rule on whether the assessment team made a reasonable decision on each of the criteria that it scored the fishery on, and the criteria are worded to make it easy for the assessment team to justify their passing grades. It’s a rigged process.

We knew from the beginning that our chances of success were low, but we had to try. We couldn’t let the MSC’s greenwashing go unchallenged.

So now what? We are going to take the message directly to consumers, letting them know that Alaska’s salmon fisheries are not sustainable. We are also going to turn our attention to other big seafood sustainability validators, like Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, which applies red/yellow/green rankings to fisheries. They are currently hiding behind the MSC’s blue checkmark, but they need to conduct their own assessment. If they do, the dirty interception fisheries in Southeast Alaska are very likely to come out red.

B.C.’s own sustainable seafood certifier Ocean Wise still has the dirty Southeast Alaskan salmon fisheries off their list of approved fisheries, but this is now “under review” and we are pushing Ocean Wise to also do a new assessment.

The only way we will get the Alaskan government and fishing industry to scale back these unsustainable fisheries is by making sure seafood buyers know the truth about the terrible impact the Southeast Alaskan fleets are having on B.C. salmon runs. We are determined to make this happen.