Clearly, the Marine Stewardship Council or some other version of eco-labelling and attestation to the sustainability of fisheries is going to become a key factor in gaining access to markets. Wal-Mart has made its views known on this; they're going to require eco-labelling on all the products they handle. They're a major retailer in seafood in the United States. We already have the situation, as you noted, in Europe.
We have a number of fisheries that are going for certification or have achieved certification. The sockeye and pink salmon certification in British Columbia has been a very long process. While we've had certification of other fisheries much more rapidly and much more quickly in some areas of the country, that one has been very demanding. And while the Alaskan fishery has been certified, it's up for recertification. We are certainly hopeful that it will have the same kinds of criteria applied to it as are being applied to the Canadian fishery.
We are working with the industry to try to respond to the Marine Stewardship Council's demand for information. Moreover, we're also looking at putting in place a checklist for Canadian fisheries whereby we look at all the factors for sustainable fisheries in Canada, whether scientific knowledge, management objectives and regimes, or socio-economic factors. All of those will be evaluated in Canadian fisheries.
That will form a way for industry to provide an attestation to their markets that they are subject to sustainable fishing practices. If they seek Marine Stewardship Council or some other eco-labelling certification, that will be the foundation from which they can work. They'll have at hand a lot of the information that would be required to respond to these demands.
We're doing that for all fisheries over the course of the next year or two. And we are making sure that the public will be aware that we are introducing the precautionary approach and ecosystem-based management in these fisheries, and that there's a checklist to demonstrate what we have by way of our science knowledge, our management objectives, etc.
It's going to be a significant change for the industry in Canada. It used to be focused on TAC and quotas, and that was it. Now an awful lot more is going to be required to respond to these demands from the marketplace, and we're going to work with the industry to meet those demands.