4. Certification as a solution

As development specialists, policy makers and western consumers have become aware of the negative impacts associated with aquaculture development, they have begun to look for ways to mitigate them. Although not all stakeholders accept a future with aquaculture most are willing to acknowledge the potential benefits and entrenched nature of the industry, and a search for potential solutions is under way to improve the environmental and social sustainability of aquaculture. Many of the advocates for change have been disappointed by the response of government institutions and the slow progress of educational extension activities in stimulating change and have begun to look to other governance mechanisms to support their goals. One of the popular solutions put forward is market-based certification which has become very popular in agro-food industries, initially successfully implemented to deal with food safety concerns, but increasingly being used to tackle environmental and social issues. Existing certification schemes in aquaculture at this time are mostly focused on food safety. Certification schemes for dealing with environmental and social issues remain largely untried in the aquaculture industry, although there are many such systems currently in development and many advocates for material and social change in global aquaculture are very optimistic that certification is a good tool for helping to mitigate the negative impacts associated with aquaculture, the reality remains to be seen.

As opponents of the aquaculture industry have begun to accept its role in the modern agro food complex, they have begun to seek to guide and modify it’s development by changing the governance of its development. Initial attempts to change the practices of aquaculture focused either on influencing governments to change their laws and regulations or on the producers themselves where educational campaigns and extension outreach activities sought to change farmers perspective and provide technical tools to reduce environmental impact and improve the efficiency of farming activities. While these kinds of activities have certainly had significant impacts (Lubchenco 2003) on aquaculture development there was is a growing feeling that that these interventions alone are too slow or simply not strong enough. From a focus on government and extension, advocates for change have begun to shift focus to ideas based on the concept of governance. The idea of governance, developed out of academic work on policy and globalization and refers to the use of “the totality of interactions, in which public as well as private actors participate, aimed at solving societal problems or creating societal opportunities; attending to the institutions as contexts for these governing interactions; and establishing a normative foundation for all those activities.” (Kooiman 2002:4) Perhaps more succinctly it is the idea that all aspects of society contribute the way an entity behaves, not just government rules, but also economic incentives, social norms etc. With this idea in mind proponents for change searched, consciously or otherwise, further amongst social institutions to identify points of leverage that could affect change, and one of the most significant ideas to emerge were governance arrangements that depended on the interactions of market based institutions.

This relatively new form of market-based governance, referred to in this thesis as certification or standards, uses a particular form of production organization in order to present products with specific desirable attributes as an alternative to similar products already in existence in the marketplace. Mutersbaugh et al. (2005) define certification systems as containing four distinct elements: a set of standards defines that quantifies desired qualities, an inspection process to determine compliance, a mark to identify the presence of certified qualities, and a network of governing parties at multiple scales to create, define and maintain the standards. Certification systems can tackle issues such as food safety and quality, authenticity of origin, or environmental and social sustainability. All of these qualities of a product are what are called credence characteristics (Tirole 1988), something not apparent by examining or testing the product. Certification systems create an organizational structure to quantify and validate these kinds of credence characteristics on behalf of the consumer.

There are many different certification systems that attempt to regulate material and social aspects of the production of forestry, fisheries and agricultural commodities, all with slightly different focuses and methodologies, but similar systems in aquaculture are still in their infancy. Environmental sustainability certification systems developed in forestry (Forest Stewardship Council, FSC) and fisheries (Marine Stewardship Council, MSC) in the mid 1990’s, and other systems that also include elements of social sustainability for agriculture such as organic and Fair Trade have been around even longer (Vandergeest, 2007). These systems developed in response to growing awareness of the material and social impacts of the production of their respective commodity area. Perhaps because of the relatively new emergence of aquaculture, similar systems in this field have only recently been undertaken, though now there are many different initiatives including work on organic, certification from the Global Aquaculture Alliance, GlobalGAP, a suite of standards associated with the World Wildlife Fund and many other smaller national level or species specific programs. There is certainly a strong feeling within the aquaculture industry and in some parts of the NGO community that certification may be the “silver bullet” to solve the current environmental and social questions that have surrounded the rapid expansion of aquaculture (e.g. Boyd et al. 2005).

Despite a generally positive reception, the merits of certification systems for environmental and social sustainability are still being questioned by some academics and NGOs who claim that their true impact has yet to be determined in the schemes that already in existence, which raises questions about their future for the field of aquaculture. Various researchers have levelled essentially two different kinds of criticisms of certification. First that there are fundamental flaws in the pursuit of certification such as the simplification of a complex production systems into a single mark (Mansfield 2003) and the conflict between quality and quantity requirements of buyers and the flexibility required to be sustainable in diverse situations (Klooster 2006). The second criticism is of unintended consequences such as Ponte (2008) who has pointed out that the positive reception by consumers in the north has resulted in marginalization smaller and poorer producers in developing countries. If certification is truly to become an acceptable option for dealing with the environmental and social impacts of aquaculture then the kinds of concerns raised by critics will have to be incorporated into the solution.

In my next posting I will introduce the case of Vietnamese Pangasius, outlining its growth, impacts and the proposed solutions currently being pursued.