NOAA could be the ‘other’ seafood certifier, if we wanted it

Recently, I published a column about the growing awareness of the seemingly dire nature of Pacific bluefin tuna stocks, and the ongoing efforts by some NGOs to get regional fishing authorities to rein in possible collective overfishing.

I suggested in the first sentence that the stocks for Pacific bluefin, “like its Atlantic cousin, are struggling.”

That drew a reader response that led to an interesting conversation and point about private-label versus government-funded sustainability certification programs, how not all data-centric programs are created equal and what the industry might want to do about it.

Rich Ruais, executive director of the American Bluefin Tuna Association, called me out on my offhand comment, noting Atlantic bluefin stocks are in better shape than they used to be.

“This not-at-all subtle or unmistakable inference that Atlantic bluefin tuna are in similar poor shape as the Pacific bluefin biomass is completely false and evidence to the contrary is overwhelmingly abundant and easily available,” Ruais told me.

To be fair, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT), as noted in this executive summary of its 2014 stock assessment, said stocks have improved since the dire days of a few decades ago.

“Spawning stock biomass (SSB) declined steadily from 1970 to 1992 and then fluctuated around 25 to 30 percent (of) the 1970 level for about the next decade,” ICCAT wrote. “In recent years, however, there appears to have been a gradual increase in SSB from about 32 percent of the 1970 level in 2003 to an estimated 55 percent in 2013.”

The improvements were enough to prompt ICCAT last summer to add to the quotas for fishing for Atlantic bluefin in the Mediterranean, though that did not sit well with NGOs, which cried foul over what they deemed a rush to raise the quotas too high and too soon.

Clearly, not everyone is convinced of the stock’s recovery. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, known for using science-based data in its recommendations, still lists all Atlantic bluefin tuna on its red “avoid” list.

Ruais said he isn’t surprised, as private-label certification programs that cater to the consumer such as Seafood Watch draw more of the public’s attention by telling bad news than good.

“The money is in the crisis,” he told me. “The money is not in saying, ‘this fish is safe.’”

The program’s science director, Wendy Norton, acknowledged the new data suggests stock improvement, but said the findings “have high uncertainty,” and that Monterey Bay will update the program’s Atlantic bluefin recommendations once the full stock report, due in November 2016, is released.

Monterey Bay's concerns mirror those of various groups who protested ICCAT’s decision in the Mediterranean last year. It should be noted, too, that even Ruais, despite often disagreeing with recommendations from NGOs or NGO-based programs, told me he did not think programs such as Seafood Watch, or certification programs from groups such as the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) or Friend of the Sea were inherently bad – he just thinks there are government-funded programs out there, such as FishWatch, a program produced by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), that deserve as much, if not more attention from the consumer.

“Governments are the groups, in my mind, that the responsibility must lie with,” he said.

Part of the problem is that government-funded programs are by definition at the mercy of what taxpayers are willing to spend on them. Groups such as Monterey Bay and the MSC are non-profit, yet they seem to be better promoted, better known and more highly regarded by the mainstream media, despite NOAA’s FishWatch program being around since 2007.

Laurel Bryant, NOAA’s chief of external affairs, said there’s another reason consumers don’t remember FishWatch the way they might the Seafood Watch program – it was never created to compete with Monterey Bay’s popular site. The initial idea, she said, was for FishWatch to offer fisheries data, the kind of information the average consumer might not understand, or want to. She described the first incarnation of FishWatch as very “dense” with technical data that was of much more use to the fisheries and fishing regulators.

Since 2000, there have been 37 seafood stocks rebuilt in the United States due to changes in fisheries management, Bryant said, and she claims some of those rebuildings as victories for FishWatch, even though the program is largely under the general public’s radar.

Despite the somewhat low public profile, Bryant described FishWatch as “our No. 1 outreach tool,” and said NOAA is planning a re-launch of the FishWatch website, tentatively for October, which is National Seafood Month. Among other things, the new site is expected to be mobile-friendly, and contain a “fish finder” search tool that might be of value to consumers.

When asked if she thought FishWatch could someday be more mainstream, like Seafood Watch, or used as a labeling program on the scale of the MSC’s eco-label, Bryant said, “I don’t think we’re opposed to trying to figure that out,” but stressed a slow-and-steady approach.

She also invited the industry and the public (and, she added, NGOs) to offer NOAA their input, and Ruais agreed that this was the best thing the industry could do right now. He acknowledged that many seafood companies worldwide should follow their customers’ demands and get their products third-party certified, but there’s no reason why industry leaders can’t lobby NOAA to promote itself more.

He’s got a point: Consumers will trust FishWatch’s science if they know it’s out there and they can make sense of it, and if NOAA does more to promote itself (Bryant herself said, “We need to get more amplified about it.”), there’s a chance it will someday gain the respect among consumers that it deserves. If industry leaders want to see that happen, they need to do their part by calling for it with NOAA.

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