The Hawaii Longline Association announced last week that it has achieved a globally recognized certification for sustainable fishing by the Marine Stewardship Council following a 16-month review process.

With the achievement comes the right to place the council’s blue eco-label on all of its products and the potential to enter new markets that insist on a higher level of sustainable fishing practices.

But some conservationists who have crossed swords with the Hawaii Longline Association are questioning the legitimacy of the certification.

“I don’t personally know anything about the certifying entity,” Earthjustice attorney David Henkin said. “All I can say is that if this isn’t just a ‘green-washing’ scam, this organization clearly hasn’t done due diligence with respect to the longline fishery.”

Henkin said Hawaii’s tuna and swordfish longline fisheries harm imperiled marine species, including sea turtles, false killer whales and sharks, while the industry association fights “tooth and nail” against regulations to reduce the amount of bycatch, the species unintentionally caught during fishing.

Eric Kingma, executive director of the Hawaii Longline Association, said recognition from the world’s largest fisheries certification program is well-deserved because of the fleet’s stringent management and monitoring regime.

“This fishery is sustainable,” he said. “It is the most highly monitored longline fishery in the world. It operates with a huge amount of oversight by the federal government. And by law, U.S. fisheries have to be sustainable.”

A fishery that meets the certification standard, according to the Marine Stewardship Council, must abide by three core principles: sustainable fish stocks, minimizing environmental impact and effective fisheries management. The standard is based on the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s code of conduct for responsible fisheries.

The certification assessment — good for five years but requiring yearly audits — covers the association’s deep-set tuna longline fishery and shallow-set swordfish longline fishery.

The association’s fleet consists of 142 vessels, generating annual income of some $125 million. That makes the Honolulu commercial fishing port one of the nation’s most valuable, producing 95% of the country’s bigeye tuna landings and 50% to 60% of its swordfish and yellowfin tuna landings.

Mark Fitchett, pelagic fisheries ecosystem scientist with the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, said the Western and Central Pacific Ocean produces more than 60% of the world’s tuna supply and is the only region where all the tropical tuna stocks are above sustainable limits.

“The Hawaii longline fishery,” Fitchett said, “is widely considered the gold standard for a well- managed and well- monitored tuna fishery.”

Part of the reason, he said, is due to the management of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, which has taken the lead in establishing vessel-monitoring systems for U.S. longline fisheries and has advocated for the increase in longline observer coverage throughout the Pacific.

Kingma said the fleet has been operating out of Honolulu with integrity for more than a century, growing to become Hawaii’s biggest food producer.

“We believe our fleet produces the best quality and highest level of monitored tuna in the world,” he said.

Henkin, however, said the Hawaii Longline Association has intervened in every case Earthjustice has brought involving the fisheries’ “documented harm” to species protected under the Endangered Species Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act and Migratory Bird Treaty Act, including sea turtles, false killer whales, sharks and albatrosses.

“This litigation goes back to the 1990s and continues through today. In every case, the fisheries have opposed every new conservation measure and, when they have lost, have lobbied hard to undo or water down those protections,” he said.

Grace Bauer, an Earth­justice oceans attorney, agreed with her colleague, noting that the impact of the fishery on several species of marine life, including green sea turtles, giant manta ray and false killer whales, remains unknown and, by law, the National Marine Fisheries Services must still make formal assessments regarding those species.

“Considering (the Marine Stewardship Council’s) second principle criteria is ‘environmental impact of fishing,’ it seems MSC should not have certified HLA without, at a minimum, first having a biological opinion that assesses the environmental impact of the fishing on these protected species,” she said.

Robin Baird, a researcher with Cascadia Research Collective and affiliate faculty member with the University of Hawaii’s Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, said the Hawaii Longline Association has been fighting efforts to better protect Hawaii’s rare false killer whale population.

“They have been pushing back for 13 years,” said Baird, a member of the False Killer Whale Take Reduction Team established by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2010. “That doesn’t seem to me like effective fisheries management.”

More than 420 fisheries around the world have earned MSC’s blue eco-label.

Conservationists point out that the MSC model calls for each fishery to pay for the certification, which calls into question the independence of the assessment.

The fee, which can range from $20,000 to $100,000, goes to the certifying agency. In Hawaii’s case, the agency was Control Union, a United Kingdom organization that specializes in auditing, certification, inspections and chain of custody assessments, among other things.

Kingma wouldn’t say how much the the Hawaii Longline Association paid for its certification, only that it was closer to $100,000 than $20,000.

“Most marine protection organizations have already long-considered this certification a sham, pay-to-play scheme, benefiting only industrial fishing interests,” said Inga Gibson, policy director of Pono Advocacy LLC.

Gibson said the HLA fishery certification assessment, which is available at the MSC website, papers over some of the fishery’s flaws, especially when it comes to bycatch.

At one point the assessment summarizes 19 “conditions,” yet there are only three conditions that “must” be met, she said.

“This is a long-held complaint about MSC — that there is no oversight or ultimate accountability under the certification,” Gibson said.

But Kingma said the fishery will have to meet certain yearly benchmarks under rules of the certification.

According to MSC, in addition to preserving fish stocks and the marine environment, the certification process ensures that products can be traced to a MSC-certified fishery through required record- keeping.

Kingma said the fishery has already worked to improve on its own. Last year the fleet vessels voluntarily switched from using wire leaders on their gear to monofilament leaders to promote shark conservation.

The fishery also pioneered the use of satellite- based vessel-monitoring systems in the late 1980s to spatially track fishing locations in near real-time, officials said, and high levels of independent observer coverage were instituted in the fleet since the early 1990s.