Seventy-five percent of Alaska’s salmon packers have decided to pull out of the Marine Stewardship Council’s fisheries certification program when the current agreement expires at the end of October. Those processors are Trident, Icicle, Ocean Beauty, Peter Pan, Alaska General, E-and-E, Kwikpak and North Pacific. The board of the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation concurred with the move on Monday.
In 2011 the London based MSC certified 287,000 metric tons of Alaska salmon.
MSC certification had once been a rare and valued indicator of a fishery’s sustainability, but as more and more fisheries became certified, the cachet has diminished, according to industry watcher John Sackton of Seafood.com.
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Jay Barrett is the news director at KMXT in Kodiak.
