Early ecolabeling initiatives for seafood were restricted to wild seafood, and most of the early literature in relation to seafood ecolabels follows this pattern, although with interesting variations such as genetic ecolabels for farmed seafood in anticipation of future market adaptions. The first ecolabels actually used for farmed seafood were organic labeling, which has the potential to fill two information objectives in that they potentially nullifies the advantage of ecolabeled wild seafood and it signals that the product is produced in a sustainable manner, even though the requirements for an organic label generally did not fit aquaculture production practices well.
During the last ten years, a number of studies have appeared investigating the potential premiums associated with the ecolabel of the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), in addition to studies still focusing on organic, and a few which captures both. The results are similar to the literature for wild fish in that the potential impact at the retail level is highly heterogenous as the price premium vary with country, retail chain and species, and there are several cases where the premium is found to be zero. Moreover, there has been no studies trying to answer the question which markets or market segments have a strong enough preference for ecolabeled fish to actually demand it.
An important discussion in fisheries is whether the ecolabel premium that exists at the retail level moves upstream to the producers and thereby actually creates economic incentives to improve production practices. This is a discussion that has barely started in the case of aquaculture products. However, we will show that to a large extent the producers who are certified with ASC label operates in countries with relatively extensive management systems, and as such that can more easily meet the requirements of the ecolabels.