Sustainable fisheries or aquaculture (seafood farming)

I have doing some detailed research into sustainable sources for seafood. My initial findings are mixed, here are my initial thoughts and findings.

Sustainable fisheries.
The Marine Stewardship Council, undertakes a detailed certification process for world fisheries. WWF Hong Kong is heavily relying on MSC certification for their Seafood Guide (click HERE for previous BLOG on this topic)

The process of certification can take upto 2 years to complete (as can be seen from the certification application of the "Hastings Fleet Pelagic Fishery", this assessment lasted from October '03 to September '05)

The list of MSC certified fisheries can be found click HERE

The list contains many North American, European and Australian fisheries and contain a variety of seafood species, however no Asian fisheries or shrimp/prawn fisheries have been certified.


Sustainable Fish Farming
There is an Asia Pacific Organisation "Network of Aquaculture Centres" " is an intergovernmental organization that promotes rural development through sustainable aquaculture", click HERE for their website.

NACA in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) has initiated a certification process for sustainable Aquaculture click HERE for notes about this certification. As far as I can tell no certificates have been issued and as can be seen from the information on the NACA website their major focus is on farming and rural community development. This certiffication process is only playing lip service to the issue.

Further potential confusion is the Thai Quality Shrimp certification (click HERE) Their Good Aquaculture Practice guidelines, even though they state, should not generate any environmental impacts are focused on producing a consumer safe product.

Groups such as NACA and Thai Quality Shrimp have no real interest in environmentally sustainable seafood farming and as such these efforts should be ignored from this perspective.

The Hong Kong Agriculture,Fisheries and Conservation Dept (AFCD) has an "Accredited fish farm scheme", this again is focused mainly on production of a safe product for the end consumer.

The is obviously space for certification and following through with identification of sustainable seafood farms, however this is not yet obvious.

No real conclusions yet, my investigations will continue.