Many observers of agro-food industries in the South see third-party certification and labelling as a way of addressing skewed power relations along global value chains. First- and second-party certifications are indeed more open to manipulation by powerful actors (Mutersbaugh 2005) than third-party certifications. Yet, third-party certifications only go part of the way, as they play themselves within specific political economies and power relations (Hanataka, Bain and Busch 2005). By externalising functions such as achieving sustainability, ‘lead firms’ in global value chains, such as large retailers and branded processors, may actually be in a better position to focus
on what they do best and at the same time outsource ‘trouble-solving’. This allows them to be even more ‘hands-off’ with their immediate suppliers and to outsource ‘non-core’ functions more effectively – thus to perform better in key financial indicators. Lead firms then can pay better attention to short-term returns, play more effectively in switching between ‘preferred’ suppliers, and fine-tune economies of scale and scope to their advantage (Ponte and Gibbon 2005). This happens in an operational environment where the extra costs of achieving food safety, environmental and social standards are moved up the value chain towards producers. Increased sustainability may indeed result from these initiatives, but Northern consumers and corporations rarely foot the bill.
Not surprisingly, developing countries have been generally reluctant to participate in ecolabelling initiatives. They have highlighted the embedded protectionist elements of some of these initiatives, and the naiveté of some standards in assuming that certain models of environmental management can be exported tout court to the South. This reluctance has been counteracted with assurances of transparency, non- discrimination and technical assistance. In essence, ecolabels are assumed to be ‘good for the global commons’ and their justification has been offered within a discourse of science, objectivity, independent certification, transparency and systems management. As long as market-based mechanisms of ensuring sustainability, such as ecolabels, are seen as ‘neutral’, larger politico-economic factors, market structures and the role of special interests and expert knowledge will remain in the twilight.
The Maritime Stewardship Council (MSC) initiative has offered more sophisticated fish suppliers a way of increasing their visibility in the market place under the guise of sustainability, alongside other ‘new wave’ sustainability certification schemes, such as Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) certified timber (Klooster 2005; Taylor 2005) and Utz Kapeh and Rainforest Alliance-certified coffees (Giovannucci and Ponte 2005). These schemes, while offering preferred supplier status to certified suppliers, are expensive to comply with and rarely offer a premium. In time, the standards that underpin them may become the new ‘minimum standards’ for the market, effectively redesigning the nature of market access. This has happened, for example, to voluntary food safety and good agricultural practice standards such as EUREP-GAP.
‘Old wave’ coffee certification schemes, such as fair trade and organics, instead offer premiums over non-certified coffees at the production level. Fair trade attempts to address some of the inequalities that are built within the trading system itself. The organic movement questions the very nature of an industrial approach to agriculture. In both cases, however, these ‘radical’ challenges seem to be on the wane (Guthman 2002; Raynolds 2002; 2004; Raynolds, Murray and Taylor 2004; Taylor 2005) in the name of commercial success. This has happened in parallel to a general move from a holistic and hands-on engagement with suppliers and towards more hands-off, auditable, systemic and managerial approaches to sustainability (Daviron and Ponte 2005). In these approaches, expert knowledge has come to play an increasingly important role. Scientists (marine biologists in the case of MSC) and systems managers are key actors. Social scientists and even economists are relatively marginalised. At the same time, activists are ‘expertised’. If shortcomings arise, they can be fixed technically and managerially.
But systemic compliance masks as much as it reveals. For example, the arrest of a vessel that fished illegal quantities of by-catch is a positive indicator for MSC in terms of fisheries control, monitoring and compliance. But the underlying cause of by-catch fishing (assuring the financial viability of a fishing company) is not addressed. The ritual of verification is used to reconcile the contrasting objectives of ensuring both conservation and financial viability. In similar ways, in the Ugandan Nile perch industry, important chunks of the regulatory and monitoring system on fish safety exist only on paper. The food safety assurance system there allows the achievement of a series of contradictory objectives: to facilitate efficient logistics and ensure food safety; to match market demand and take care of sustainability; to implement a top- down food safety monitoring system and a bottom-up fisheries co-management system. This means that at least some food safety-related operations have to be carried out as ‘rituals of verification’ (Ponte 2005; 2007; Power 1997). Thus, conformity to systems performance and specific rules becomes more important than achieving the stated objectives of ‘sustainability’, safe food or fair trade. Principles are being ‘chocked’ by managerial rules and demands, although a counter- movement may be detectable in the auditing profession to go ‘back to principles’. Verification in particular is explicitly constructed as a pedagogical exercise. It is not meant to exclude, but to teach management and better conformity. This is implicit in
the nature of auditing (Power 1997), but does not bode well for actually achieving ‘sustainability’.
Much of the literature on sustainability labels has focused on standard setting, governance and implementation. Under this rubric, the MSC initiative has been criticised on a variety of counts: for having been driven by the largest commercial player in the industry – at least at the beginning; for not having consulted with fishers and with developing country industry actors at the stage of standard development; for having a centralised and corporate structure; for being biased in favour of industrial fisheries – and developed country fisheries in particular; for the high costs of compliance and certification; and for not ensuring ‘sustainability’.
This paper placed more emphasis on the motivations behind the adoption of MSC, on verification procedures that follow certification, and on local settings. MSC certification, far from being simply a neutral and equal instrument yielding better conservation for humanity, is achieved in the context of global and local competition, special interest battles, and local politics. In South Africa, although couched in a discourse of conservation, MSC was one of the instruments used to justify positions in debates that had race relations and possible redressing of past wrongs under apartheid as the main issues at stake. It was played as a tool against the re- distribution of quotas away from main, white-owned, quota holders to the possible benefit of ‘black’-owned smaller quota holders and new entrants within the deep-sea hake sector. It was also used as a tool to avoid redistribution of quota away from the large, mainly white-owned, deep-sea trawling sector to the advantage of the mostly ‘black’-owned longlining sector. Similarly, in the case of timber, ‘FSC [certification in Mexico] provides communities and indigenous groups with a defence against criticism for their alleged role in forest degradation and sometimes has been a key resource in communities and indigenous groups’ struggle for more secure land resource tenure’ (Taylor 2005: 138). Local politics and the situated political economy of conservation do matter for ‘sustainability’ certifications.
Developing country fisheries, and small-scale ones in particular, have been marginalised in the MSC system. Only two fisheries in South Africa and Mexico have been certified so far. This is not surprising if one looks at comparative evidence from other ‘new wave’ sustainability initiatives in timber and coffee. Delivering
‘sustainability’ at no additional cost and in large volumes demands standards that are tough in terms of systems compliance, but actually quite approachable in terms of the thresholds of sustainability indicators. Entry barriers to ‘sustainability’ entail economies of scale and scope that require managerial resources and access to networks. Because managerial and systemic objectives are harder for developing country actors to match, this creates a hidden imbalance in favour of more endowed participants.
A stimulus for revising the MSC system in a way that is friendlier towards developing countries could have been the adoption in March 2005 by the FAO Committee of Fisheries (COFI) of voluntary guidelines for ecolabelling of fish products (FAO 2005). These guidelines provide a framework of reference for governments and organisations that have or want to establish ecolabels for marine capture fisheries. They include the need for independent auditing, transparency of standard-setting and accountability, and the need for standards to be based on ‘good science’. They also lay down minimum requirements and criteria for assessing whether a fishery should be certified and an ecolabel awarded, drawing on FAO’s Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries.
Unfortunately, transparency and inclusivity in standard setting do not work retroactively. Also, instead of calling for special standards and verification systems to be applied in developing countries, the FAO guidelines simply call for ‘financial and technical support’. MSC stated that its system would be wholly consistent with the FAO guidelines by June 2006 (Fish4Thought, March 2006). The MSC system can apparently be fixed just by outsourcing accreditation to an independent organisation, and by making ‘decisions relating to complaints and appeals … fully independent of the MSC. A fee structure for complaints is a further necessary change to conform with the guideline, and this will be designed to protect equitable access for all interest groups’ (ISEAL Gazette, March 2006).
Special systems of compliance and verification are necessary to cater for the needs of developing countries and small-scale producers. MSC was proposed such an instrument (see Wilson et al. 2002), but decided not to adopt it. Until this happens, and until premiums are not paid at the producer level, MSC and similar initiatives will keep putting ‘sustainability’ at the service of commercial interests. The most
important question is not whether a set of stricter or looser standards are needed to ensure ‘proper sustainability’. What is more important is to promote a movement from rules and indicators back to principles. This entails a less managerialist approach and more room for judgment on how principles can be achieved in specific political economies and local conditions.37