Seems like lately we're taking a world tour via industry greenwashing of certain fisheries as "sustainable". I posted a piece on the problems with the Marine Stewardship Council's certification of the New Zealand hoki fishery last week, and now British Columbia's The Tyee takes us down to Peru for a look at the pending MSC certification of the anchovy fishery -
Each year 30 million tonnes of small wild-caught fish -- one third of the global declared catch -- are ground up to feed industrially farmed fish, chicken, and pigs. In light of widespread overfishing and malnutrition, is it ethical to turn one out of every three marine fish into powdered pig feed?
We were dismayed when we heard that the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) announced recently that the process has begun which could lead to the certification of Peruvian anchovies -- a fish which contributes to about a third of the world's fishmeal production.
The Tyee piece is really worth a read, as it sums up quickly and concisely exactly what the problems are with letting the commercial fishing industry regulate itself, and define what is "sustainable" through the Marine Stewardship Council, a creation of the World Wildlife Fund and Unilever, which just so happens to be one of the world's largest seafood retailers. The reasoning for Unilever's participation in the creation of the MSC was that...
[Unilever] wanted to source all of their fish from sustainable sources by 2005.
...and since nations are hesitant to get into defining 'sustainable' fisheries, what better way to accomplish that goal than to create an industry certification scheme with a little bit of environmental credibility (teaming up with WWF) to do your bidding? WalMart, btw, is also currently basking in the MSC's "green showers" for much of the fish that they sell.
At first, MSC was only able to certify small, actual sustainable fisheries using real science. Of course, that didn't aid in reaching industry's goals (which are unsustainable by definition - there is simply no possible way for corporations whose only concern (by law) is profit, to be able to work with the earth at the expense of a few pennies for shareholders)... so MSC has lately been acting as a Rubber Greenwashing Stamp for Big (Sea)Food.
There's nothing at all "sustainable" about grinding up millions of tons of fish for animal feed, when such fish could of course just be used to feed people in the first place. Especially in Peru, where the anchovy caught just off their coast could go quite a way towards eradicating hunger and malnutrition amongst the Peruvian people themselves, in a much more efficient manner than turning the fish into pellets or powder for industrial pig and salmon farms thousands of miles away ever could. |
