Watchdog groups argue that aquaculture certifications often mask industrial practices behind trust‑building labels, while organizations like the Aquaculture Stewardship Council say certification remains one of the few scalable tools for improving production in a fragmented global industry.
At the heart of the debate over aquaculture sustainability is a fundamental disagreement over what certification systems are meant to do – and whether they can realistically deliver what consumers believe they promise.
Why certifications are not delivering what they promise
“These certifications are not holding up to their promises,” said Laura Lee Cascada, founder and director of the Aquaculture Accountability Project, whose work focuses on investigating aquaculture certification systems. The goal of auditing aquaculture certification systems is “challenging [certifications] and changing that narrative, making sure that people and decision makers, companies and institutions know what’s really being certified here,” she said.
Cascada’s critique is informed by parallel experience inside the animal welfare and food system reform movement.
Watchdog organization Farm Forward has spent roughly two decades focusing “exclusively on industrial animal farming,” said Andrew deCoriolis, Farm Forward’s executive director.
For more than a decade, Farm Forward helped design and implement animal welfare certification programs that rely on voluntary labels to encourage producers to improve how animals are raised.
“We went into that project with the hope that these voluntary certifications could play a role in transitioning large animal producers towards better practices,” deCoriolis said, adding that the aim was to align labels with “what consumers actually expect when they look at a package.”
Over time, however, he said his optimism eroded.
“Our experience over the 10 years was that these labels, more often than not, become primarily a marketing tool for the meat and seafood companies that are using them,” deCoriolis said, “rather than a tool for consumers to differentiate between better and worse products.”
By around 2020, Farm Forward concluded it needed to shift its approach.
“We had to switch our role from a supporter of certifications and an advocate for them to a group that was really focused on accountability,” he added.
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“If [certifications] raise the bar too much, that will cause companies not to participate. ... So the incentive is really to keep the standards only as high as companies are willing to pay.”
Laura Lee Cascada, founder and director of the Aquaculture Accountability Project
A built-in conflict of interest
At the center of Cascada’s critique is what she describes as a structural problem baked into most certification systems.
“Certifications, for the most part, are funded by the very companies that they’re certifying,” she emphasized.
“If [certifications] raise the bar too much, that will cause companies not to participate,” Cascada added. “So the incentive is really to keep the standards only as high as companies are willing to pay.”
In aquaculture, that dynamic has translated into certification of industrial practices rather than meaningful reform, she argued. “These major certifications are basically certifying factory farm conditions.”
She explained, “There aren’t disease limits,” and “there’s irresponsible use of antibiotics. There’s sea lice.”
She also points to weak enforcement mechanisms.
“A lot of the farms aren’t being visited every year,” she said. Instead, many programs rely on “sampling-based audits,” and “some of them don’t even make those results public.”
As a result, investigations have documented “labor abuses,” “illegal antibiotics” and “sea lice levels greatly exceeding what is supposed to happen within the standard,” while “these places remain certified,” she said.
Consumer trust and the greenwashing problem
The gap between certification claims and on-farm reality has direct consequences for consumers, Cascada and deCoriolis argued.
“People are shopping and they think that they’re buying something that they can trust,” Cascada said. “They don’t imagine that these are the conditions.”
Instead, she says, “the certifications are being used to gain their trust and get them to buy the products.”
The result, Cascada argued, is “a really sort of sophisticated form of greenwashing.”
The risk of greenwashing is amplified by how food purchasing decisions are made, deCoriolis said. “Consumers are spending one second, two seconds in a grocery store making a choice,” he explained. They “see a label, they don’t really know what it means,” but conclude, “yeah, that looks good.”
Survey research reinforces that disconnect, Cascada adds.
“A vast majority of people, when they looked at the label, said that they trusted it,” she said, adding “other surveys have shown that people just don’t understand these labels.”
The ASC perspective: Improvement within a global system
Organizations such as the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) operate from a different premise. The organization is financially independent and does not receive producer fees, according to ASC.
ASC describes its certification system as a way to steadily raise standards across global aquaculture production, using common requirements for water quality, animal health, feed sourcing, traceability and independent audits.
From ASC’s perspective, sustainability is not determined by any single metric, but by how the system performs as a whole – and certification is one of the few tools it sees as workable at scale in a fragmented, international seafood industry.
ASC also argues that some critiques fail to account for trade‑offs and gradual progress, particularly around feed, which it frames as an ongoing process involving suppliers, research and increased disclosure rather than a fixed end point.
A fundamental disagreement about expectations
For Cascada and deCoriolis, however, the debate ultimately comes down to outcomes rather than intentions.
“For us, it comes down to two big factors,” which is “our ethical judgment” and “what we think consumers expect,” deCoriolis argued.
“If a consumer sees a label and they believe that it means a certain kind of production practice,” he said, and the certification does not deliver that, “it’s greenwashing.”
The conclusion, he added, is blunt: “If they don’t meet consumer expectations, they need to improve or they need to go away.”
Cascada acknowledged that alternatives exist.
“There are forms of aquaculture, like seaweed, that are completely beneficial,” she said, noting that aquaculture was once “small-scale, community-based.”
But both reject the idea that certification alone can reconcile industrial scale with sustainability. “Ultimately, absolutely, the scale is the problem,” deCoriolis said.
“These certifications are filling a niche that should be filled by actual regulation in the public interest,” Cascada added.
Until that changes, Cascada and deCoriolis argue, labels may do more to reassure consumers than to transform the system behind them.
