Assessment of the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) objectives and principles as compared to those of The Sustainability Consortium (TSC) for consistency evaluation.

MRAG provided an assessment of the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) objectives and principles as compared to those of "The Sustainability Consortium" (TSC) in order to evaluate their consistency. The major need for this is the adoption by certain retailers of the TSC principles and the consequent need for assurance that if they also adopt ASC products there will be no lack of consistency. 

The ASC was founded in 2010 by WWF and IDH (Dutch Sustainable Trade Initiative) as an independent not for profit organisation with global influence under ISEAL. The ASC works with aquaculture producers, seafood processors, retail and foodservice companies, scientists, conservation groups and consumers to: 
1.       Recognise and reward responsible aquaculture through the ASC aquaculture certification programme and seafood label. 
2.       Promote best environmental and social choice when buying seafood. 
3.       Contribute to transforming seafood markets towards sustainability. 

Thus a major objective of the ASC is the reduction of the social and environmental footprint of aquaculture through an emphasis on responsible production towards sustainability. The ASC Principles extend at the time over six product types including fin fish, shrimps and bivalves. Each product type or species was developed to some extent independently by the Dialogue process and, as such show considerable variability in detail of Criteria and Indicators whilst still sharing the same objectives and values. 
The principles of the TSC were rather more generic and geared towards the general assessment of sustainability of a production process. An outline has been provided with the Terms of Reference (TOR) for the assessment (Table 1). The task is therefore to assess if these principles are generally applicable to the overall objectives and approach of the ASC and also as to whether they are equally applicable to all six ASC Standards as they stand at the moment.