The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) has been the reigning seafood certification for a number of years. But its accessibility and appropriateness for the small-scale developing world sector has been questioned. Through key informant interviews and bench-marking the MSC standard and the standard of Fair Trade USA, an alternative socially-based standard, against the FAO Guidelines for Securing Small Scale fisheries, we discuss this study the role of this new emerging standard in a seafood world dominated by MSC.