Tuna from the Seychelles - one of the largest stocks to supply the UK - came one step closer to gaining Marine Stewardship Council certification this week as John West pledged to fully fund a £100,000 initial sustainability assessment.

The canned fish brand’s parent company - MW Brands - plans to pay for an MSC pre-assessment of the Seychelles purse seine tuna fishery, from which it currently processes 90,000 tonnes of own-label and John West-branded tuna a year.

A pre-assessment is recommended before full MSC certification is sought. It would make clear if and how the fishery - which currently relies on controversial fish aggregation devices (FADs) comprising flotillas of bamboo and netting - is capable of making the move to MSC approval.

John West sourced 55% of all its tuna supplies through the Seychelles fishery, said MD Paul Reenan. “If we want to continue to source these volumes, it is imperative that we do this in the most sustainable way possible,” he added.

To date, eight tuna fisheries around the world have been certified by the MSC, with the Maldives pole and line skipjack tuna fishery added last month. However, unlike the Seychelles fishery, none of those fisheries use FADs, which are condemned by campaigners because they lead to bycatch of non-target species and the netting can entangle sharks.

At a Seychelles tuna conference last week, Laurent Dagorn, a senior French scientist at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, warned there was an urgent need to use non-mesh material for FADs as new research had revealed the number of silky sharks becoming entangled and perishing was far higher than previously thought.

The Seychelles tuna fleet is already moving towards non-mesh FADs.

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