Good practice:

Protocol establishment on seafood through ASC certification in Greek aquacultures

The Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) is an international non-profit organization that maintains a policy on farmed seafood thus maintaining sustainable aquaculture. It offers a strict certification and marking scheme for safe and responsible aquaculture suppliers ensuring consumers that the seafood they buy is environmentally friendly and socially responsible. The ASC standards resulted from the WWF-initiated Aquaculture Dialogues, a multi-stakeholder series of dialogs that took place over the course of a decade involving about 2,000 scientists, NGOs, industry participants and other stakeholders. The ASC has standards for the 12 species which follow: abalone, bivalves, freshwater trout, pangasius, salmon, seriola and cobia, shrimp, and tilapia.
Two aquacultures, run by Nireus, in Greece have accredited to the ASC 's new Seabass, Seabream, and Meagre Level on 5 June 2019. The program was extended in response to stakeholder demand for an ASC standard for seabass, seabream and meagre, which customers in European markets have historically enjoyed. The new standard is based on a combination of measures from the current multi-stakeholder standards of ASC and additional metrics developed to resolve the unique impacts of seabass, seabream, and meagre in agriculture.
This practice is related to Activity “A3.2 Interregional workshop on promoting relevant EU labels” of the EXTRA-SMEs project.

The annual value of the ACS seafood products can reach up to 3,298 € with different royalty rates, depending on the cost (rates can be 1.60%,8,00% and 15,99%).

For the ASC-labeled sales of consumer facing, annual costs can reach up to 399.780 €, with royalty rates between 0.5% - 0.3%.

The Global Review of the ASC’s Standard finds that most ASC-certified farms successfully meet benefit forage fish dependency ratios for fishmeal and fish oil, the parasiticide use limit, and limits on escapes, lethal incidents involving marine mammals, antibiotic use and viral disease mortality outweighing the costs over time with respect to environmental, social and longer term economic benefits. (chemical costs down – infrastructure, certification and bank interest costs up).

In order for an aquaculture to be certified by the ASC, a comprehensive series of criteria must be fulfilled; including pre-assessment, on-site aquaculture audit and an audit report which may lead up to challenges.

The proposed practice is transferable to other organisations and has a big potential for transfer and learning. Needs addressed are common among sectors, organisations and different regions/countries. The organizational resistance risk is predicted to be low, due to the vast majority of benefits offered by this best practice. ACS applies a third-party certification system, meaning that certification of farms and product suppliers are done by independent certifiers. Certifiers are accredited and monitored by an independent accreditation organisation, Assurance Services International. This ensures the program is robust, credible and meets best practice guidelines for standard-setting organisations as set out by ISEAL Alliance and United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Certified farms are subject to an annual surveillance audits including a risk analysis, focusing on the farms improvement plan/s and on a sample of the standard requirements.