French Retail Giant Sponsors Sole Fishery Assessment
For the first time in France, a retailer, Carrefour, is offering financial support towards a fishery’s sustainability assessment. The company will be backing the producers' organisation FROM Nord, who have entered their Eastern Channel and North Sea sole fishery for assessment to the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) fisheries standard.
In France, this is the first time a retailer has offered its financial support to a fishery beginning an assessment. Thierry Missonnier, director of FROM Nord, talks about this opportunity: "For several years now, FROM Nord has been committed to the MSC program, with the certification of the North sea saithe, North East Arctic cod and haddock fisheries, and the recent evaluation begun by the Eastern Channel and North Sea herring fishery. We were thinking about beginning assessment of the sole fishery to promote its good practices when Carrefour contacted us to support our approach".
Hervé Gomichon, Director of Quality and Sustainable Development at Carrefour Group, indicates: “With strong commitments made with regard to the preservation of marine resources, Carrefour keeps contributing to the development of responsible fishing. We wished to support the commitment made by the French fishing industry in favour of sustainable and responsible fishing by sponsoring the MSC assessment of the Eastern Channel and North Sea sole fishery. If the fishery receives the MSC certification, we will be able to offer MSC-labelled French sole to our customers”.
Edouard Le Bart, MSC Country Manager for France, adds: "We are delighted to see this project go ahead. The partnership between FROM Nord and Carrefour for the evaluation of this fishery is the perfect illustration of what the MSC strives to promote: bringing together the industry's stakeholders, such as fishermen and retailers, to advance the common goal of sustainable fishing. The biggest step is yet to come for the fishery and the experts, who will evaluate it and decide whether it meets the requirements of our high-level environmental Standard. We wish them the best of luck!"
The Eastern Channel and North Sea sole (Solea solea) is fished using 10- to 17-meter long fishing boats and trammel nets in an area located between the Belgian border and the Cherbourg tip. This artisanal fishery, supported by FROM Nord, consists of 85 fishing vessels spread over five ports in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Haute Normandie regions. Sole is one of the most significant species for the organisation, with regards to volume (1990 tonnes in 2013), and in recent years has been the leading species in terms of value. The sole is well known for its high quality, and most landings of are sold at auction sales, with some reserved for direct sale to individuals. If the fishery meets the MSC's environmental standard, it could become the first French sole fishery to become MSC-certified.
The assessment will be conducted by the independent certification body MacAlister Elliott and Partners Ltd. The fishery will be evaluated according to the three fundamental principles of the MSC fisheries standard: the sustainability of the target stock, maintenance of the ecosystem, and the effectiveness of the fishery management system.
About the partners
FROM Nord, is a producers organisation created in Boulogne sur Mer in 1965. Among its members are ocean-fishing companies at the ports of Boulogne sur Mer (EURONOR), Saint-Malo (Compagnie des Pêches Saint Malo), and Fécamp (France Pélagique), as well as 202 artisan ships: trawlers, mussel dredgers, and netters unloading at the ports of Dunkerque Boulogne, Calais, Dieppe and Fécamp, as well as the Gulf of Gascogne.
CARREFOUR runs 4 store formats (hypermarket, supermarket, local store and cash & carry) in France, where it has over 4,500 outlets. For over fifty years, Carrefour has positioned itself as a partner in the day-to-day life of its millions of customers, offering them a wide range of goods and services at the best possible price. Through its activities, Carrefour Group aims to develop responsible trade, mindful of the environment and of people and is committed to product quality and customer satisfaction.
The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is an international non-profit organization set up to help transform the seafood market to a sustainable basis. The MSC runs the only certification and ecolabelling program for wild-capture fisheries consistent with the ISEAL Code of Good Practice for Setting Social and Environmental Standards and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization Guidelines for the Ecolabelling of Fish and Fishery Products from Marine Capture Fisheries. These guidelines are based upon the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fishing and require that credible fishery certification and ecolabelling schemes include:
• Objective, third-party fishery assessment utilizing scientific evidence;
• Transparent processes with built-in stakeholder consultation and objection procedures;
• Standards based on the sustainability of target species, ecosystems and management practices.
The MSC has regional or area offices in London, Seattle, Tokyo, Sydney, The Hague, Beijing, Berlin, Cape Town, Copenhagen, Halifax, Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, Santiago, Moscow, Salvador, Singapore and Reykjavik.
In total, more than 345 fisheries are engaged in the MSC program with 243 certified and 102 under full assessment. Together, fisheries already certified or in full assessment record annual catches of close to ten million metric tonnes of seafood. This represents over eleven per cent of the annual global harvest of wild capture fisheries. Certified fisheries currently land over seven million metric tonnes of seafood annually – close to eight per cent of the total harvest from wild capture fisheries. Worldwide, more than 25,000 seafood products, which can be traced back to the certified sustainable fisheries, bear the blue MSC ecolabel.