The controversial Pew critique of the Marine Stewardship Council from the Journal Nature:
A growing number of consumers want to eat seafood without feeling guilty. Enter the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which purports to certify sustainable fisheries and provides a label for sustainable products to “promote the best environmental choice in seafood”. The MSC is growing rapidly; the organization is also rapidly failing on its promise.
The MSC has become the world's most established fisheries certifier: 94 fisheries are currently MSC-certified, accounting for about 7% of global catch, and about 118 more are under assessment. MSC-certified seafood products, identified with a blue check-mark label, pack the shelves of stores such as Wal-Mart, Whole Foods Market and Waitrose. Although other certification schemes exist, such as Friend of the Sea based in Milan, Italy, the MSC is taken most seriously by scientists. The MSC is praised in Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), and is featured as a solution to declining fish stocks in the 2009 film The End of the Line.
However, objections to MSC certifications are growing. Scores of scientists (including ourselves) and many conservation groups, including Greenpeace, the Pew Environment Group and some national branches of the WWF, have protested over various MSC procedures or certifications. We believe that, as the MSC increasingly risks its credibility, the planet risks losing more wild fish and healthy marine ecosystems.
This can be turned around only if the MSC creates more stringent standards, cracks down on arguably loose interpretation of its rules, and alters its process to avoid a potential financial incentive to certify large fisheries.
Read the complete story from PEW.