November 10, 2021
Dear On The Hook members,
Marine Stewardship Council response: OTH call for an independent review of the MSC
Thank you for your correspondence of 23 September addressed to our Board and Board
Chairman Dr Werner Kiene; I am pleased to reply on their behalf.
I am sorry that our letter did not alleviate your concerns regarding your call for reform of the Marine
Stewardship Council’s governance, operations, business model and application of its Standards.
We agree that the ecological emergency has become ever more urgent and, as such, we wish to work
collaboratively with stakeholders across the entire seafood supply chain to help advance our shared goals on
achieving ocean sustainability. However, we are just one organisation amongst many trying to catalyse
change and improvements in the way our oceans are being fished and we feel strongly that the NGO
community should be working together given the scale of the challenge that faces our global oceans.
We stand by our governance systems which help inform, shape and set direction for future MSC policy and
program development through both internal and external consultative processes. It is these processes that
have guided the current Fisheries Standard Review bringing the highest level of scrutiny and participation to
this stakeholder-led process.
Reiterating what I explained in my letter of 12 July, we uphold these systems as best in class and comply with
all necessary benchmarking tools to ensure the MSC maintains and builds relevance in an ever-changing
world. This latest Standard Review has undergone an extensive level of stakeholder consultation to evolve
our Standard in line with best practice in fisheries science and management.
I would like to specifically address your assertion that the FSR is an internal MSC-driven exercise. Indeed, it is
quite the opposite. The FSR builds on the input from external stakeholders, including conservation
organisations, that have logged their ideas, suggestions, and knowledge on how the MSC Standard can
improve. We therefore disagree with your points related to the FSR being an internally driven exercise, which
also seems to undermine the commitment, effort, and input that your NGO peers, and indeed, members of
your own campaign, have made with regards to this current FSR round.
We take stakeholder engagement very seriously and have always welcomed dialogue with OTH to address
the issues raised by your campaign. Through the FSR, as well as wider stakeholder activity, we have
deepened our understanding on how we can better collaborate, partner, and mutually invest in ocean issues
to achieve the outcomes we are collectively striving for. As such, we have recently launched a Stakeholder
Engagement Survey and are inviting hundreds of partners and stakeholders to participate in this exercise to
help build knowledge about how we can improve our engagement with others. We welcome your input on
this exercise and hope the OTH campaign, and its members, will engage.
We wholeheartedly believe that given the scale of the environmental challenges humanity faces, so much
more could be achieved by working together, as a sustainable seafood movement, to accelerate the scaling
and delivery of solutions. We therefore hope that we can arrive at a place where the OTH campaign can work
with, not against the MSC, to ensure we collectively drive progress on oceans issues. While the MSC offers
its own suite of tools to drive change and move the dial in the right direction, we are eager to continue to
engage with the wider NGO community – each of which offers their own suite of tools –to ensure we are
able to achieve a shared vision for thriving, healthy oceans and seas.
We would welcome a meeting with OTH at the MSC London office to discuss further the points raised in your
letter, but importantly to engage on how we might proactively move forward on the issues raised by your
campaign. I am sure that having an opportunity to engage face-to-face could offer a better platform to
improve mutual understanding on respective next steps and how best to work together going forward.
Yours sincerely,
Erin Priddle – Regional Director, North Europe
