Impact of Market-Led Interventions on Workers
This brief is grounded in the author’s 2024 article, “Is tuna ecolabeling causing fishers more harm than good?," published in Nature Ocean Sustainability. This research is situated in the field of counter-accounting, which involves content analysis and searching for incidents reported by authoritative sources to learn whether the actions, processes, and impacts described in corporate disclosures on sustainability and human rights are supported by real-world evidence.
An analysis was performed on the primary data published for 3,327 tuna vessels by the Marine Stewardship Council. The research method involved creating a database of the fishing vessels catching tuna in 49 fisheries the ecolabel had certified. Client-supplied catch volumes, as well as vessel and labor information were collected. The data were verified in the public domain where gaps in vessel data were filled to the extent possible. The data were analyzed to better understand how forced labor was kept out of the certified tuna supply chain in consideration of the ecolabel’s mandatory requirements and disqualification procedures.