As we mentioned early last week, Logan Kock joined other members of The California Sustainable Seafood Initiative at a recent Advisory Panel Meeting. Their busy agenda was a chock full of presentations and round table discussions focusing on what should be included in the sustainability standards for seafood harvested in California.

Speakers from the Alaskan Seafood Marketing institute, the World Wildlife Federation, Greenpeace, the Marine Stewardship Council, the Leadership in Energy and Engineering Design, and the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance offered words of wisdom to the panel.

Although the state of California already has some of the toughest Fisheries standards and laws in the world, the panel focused a lot of energy on whether or not we need to have our fisheries certified by an internationally respected standard like the MSC or can we go it alone (like the state of Alaska) and still be seen as credible? Greenpeace, the MSC and Alaska standards are all based on the same FAO Guidelines and all require third party compliance verification by an accredited certification auditor. The MSC process is more costly. The stand alone option gives us the opportunity to tie the local community into the certification, especially with the certification logo and will help spread our dollars further while getting more fisheries certified.

These discussions will continue at the next public meeting set for October where the group will finalize their recommendations on whether to adopt our own more rigorous version of the FOA and use third party auditors to certify fisheries, adopt the MSC standard and use the same auditors to certify fisheries, or possibly a combination of both.

If these ideas are piquing your interest you are certainly encouraged to attend the next meeting! We’d love to see you there; more information can be found here.