The Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), Global Aquaculture Association (GAA) and GlobalGap agreed Tuesday to develop a plan to harmonize their various sustainable seafood certification standards to reduce duplication between the programs and make it easier for producers and buyers to adopt certification programs.
The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) comes short of unifying the three programs into one, but it does lay the basis for a more complete integration in the future. The agreement could lead to a tiering of standards.
The MOU does not impact each certification group’s ability to develop its respective product independently.
The agreement requires the groups to identify common elements of their standards and audit criteria and seek ways to conduct combined audits to their respective standards so certification bodies can conduct a single audit against all of the groups’ standards at once, to avoid duplication of effort and reduce the cost and inconvenience of multiple audits.
It also requires the certification standard-setting groups to develop feed requirements appropriate for each feed component to avoid conflicting or differing standards that increase the cost of compliance.
ASC, GAA and GlobalGap also agreed to explore the development of a common IT approach to managing the business workflow and data storage the certification of hatcheries, farms, fish feed and processing operations.
The MOU also calls for the aligning of the group’s chain of custody certification to reduce audit duplication and improve the reliability of seafood traceability, as well as encourage transparency regarding claims made by sellers of certified products.
Responding to the announcement, Jim Cannon, Chief Executive of Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, said: "SFP welcomes this important announcement and looks forward to supporting this initiative in any way we can. We particularly hope to make contributions in the areas of feed, on-farm benchmarking and convergent IT solutions."