tell me how, without a workable certification system, I can be sure that the livestock I purchase have been sustainably brought to market, either by captive breeding or by environmentally sensitive capture in the wild?
The idea of certifying batches of fishes from hundreds of villages in Indonesia and the Philippines is at once unworkable and impractical.
The very thought of having city based and NGO paid "observers" verifying the veracity of every bicolor angel, copperband butterfly and triggerfish from 400 villages week in and week out thruout the year boggles the imagination.
Geometrically multiplying batches of fishes times all the villages in question would create an impossible pile of false data as the batches melt together with others ...week after week in any possible real world scenario.
3 scources of coral beauties this week not all sold evolve into 6 next week and so on. Keeping track would be a full time job for keen, motivated observers. Then... this dense matrix of data would remain integral as it follows exports to a wholesaler with several other suppliers of the same species?
The integrity and the credibility of such a scheme would not even be trusted with the paid observers....let alone without them.
A far superior solution to the problem that no one adresses these days anyway [ ie poison fishing] is simply
training the divers to use nets....something that all divers in the world use except for a few countries.
The reason that training fish collectors to use nets is not popular is because the grants for aquarium reform are written by people uninvolved with and ignorant of the trade issues to begin with.
Google searches reveal things written by people who do google searches to reveal things written by others who did the same. This daisy chain of
missing the point creates no nothing experts who continue to evolve a body of ignorance and irrelevance.
This is how professional,
semi-Greens have ruined the environmental movement and lost touch with reality and workable solutions at field level.
Knee jerk sound bites echoing the same misfired notions and failed, unworkable solutions like certification ... [a frozen seafood scheme ] will not work in all but simpler, controlled situations with a paid data keeper and manager.
Then, he must still placate the divers and convince them that reefs are saved thru better bookkeeping, lots of paperwork and daily logs and compliances.
ELIMINATING THE PROBLEMS SHOULD BE THE POINT....and not some search for complicated, expensive and unworkable solutions that benefit only the group that wins the grant money.
Training and converting divers means you don't need a scheme to monitor and spy on them forever.... as you beg for budgets to continue in perpetuity.
Real reformers put themselves out of business as they generate real progress in solving problems.
Steve