Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands Alaska Pacific cod: the fishers' story

Meet the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands Pacific cod fishers

MSC certification has helped the Alaska Pacific cod fisheries reach new markets and earn recognition for their sustainable management efforts. James Browning, head of the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation, discusses the fisheries' history of sustainability and the emerging impacts of certification for the fishery.

 Quick facts

• Long track record of sustainability due to careful management

• Commitment to science-based management

• MSC certification has potential to open up new markets
  
  

"We were sustainable when we signed on with MSC, and it is the excellent management structure that makes us sustainable and which has helped the fishery compare favorably to the MSC standards."

 James Browning, executive director of the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation

Why we chose MSC certification

After the Alaska salmon fisheries became MSC certified, other fisheries around the state began to wonder if certification could be a way to open additional markets or secure other long-term benefits. The Pacific cod fishery, which operates in both the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea, was one of the fisheries.

After a couple of delays and hesitations, the cod fisheries decided to go ahead with certification in 2006 because certification "was no longer considered a moving target and that it may in the long run be beneficial for adding markets for the Pacific cod fishery," explains James Browning, executive director of the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation, which works on behalf of the state's fishing industry.

What sets us apart

Here are a few of the factors that have resulted in the Alaska Pacific cod fishery’s sustainability:

• Catch limits maintain sustainable harvest.

• Requirements for gear such as rollers on trawl footropes limit environmental impacts.

• Commitment to science-based management, with input from an array of different agencies and scientists.

• Robust management program ensuring fishery conforms to Alaskan regulations, which themselves line up with MSC sustainability standards.

• Ongoing commitment to gathering more data about stocks and environmental impacts.
  

Environmental benefits of MSC certification

As far as sustainability goes, Browning says the credit should go to the fisheries' federal and state management systems. "We were sustainable when we signed on with MSC, and it is the excellent management structure that makes us sustainable and which has helped the fishery compare favourably to the MSC standards," Browning says.

That management structure covers the two management areas and four gear types – trawl, longline, pot and jig – and involves setting catch limits and then allocating those allowable catches to each gear type. There are also gear-related sustainability measures, including requirements for rollers on the footropes of the trawl nets in order to keep the cables off the seabed and to limit the impact on benthic habitat.

"The premise is basically that you do it with science, you do it with a lot of science, and you do it with scientists that have different interests – you’ve got marine mammal folks, ecosystem folks, population dynamics folks, etc. as well as scientists from different agencies," explains Browning.

He also notes that these changes had been begun and were implemented separately from the MSC process. "The MSC process has come along and given these regulatory changes its blessing," he says.

Economic benefits of MSC certification

The hoped-for economic benefits of certification are beginning to arrive for the Alaska cod fisheries – sometimes in unexpected ways.

Browning notes that a couple of years ago when "the bottom was falling out of the cod market," much of the Alaska cod was shipped to Chinese processors to be processed into an end product. These processors wanted MSC certified fish so that their end product would be MSC certified when it was shipped back to markets where certification is known to carry more weight, like Europe and North America.

Looking ahead...

Aside from further expanding the management agencies' requirements for measures such as rollers in trawl fisheries to decrease environmental impacts, the fishery is also gathering greater amounts of data on their stocks and impacts.

 
The article above was written by an independent journalist commissioned by the MSC to find out how MSC certification has helped this fishery.