Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Small-scale fisheries can guarantee enough supply of fish production around the world with low expenditure of energy, although they operate through some constraints. Certification schemes have been printing the sustainability face in fish products, some aspects like transparency, traceability and standardization catches international suppliers attention for those products, and the communication with consumers are one of the benefits ecolabels can bring to firms. With lack of data, huge costs, and low infrastructure, certification schemes become hard to reach for small-scale fisheries, leaving the sustainability face only to large scale firms. Due to a large portion of global artisanal fishing does not reaching the so-called sustainable market because certifications are unattainable for artisanal fishermen and women, the current paper searched on developing a new certification method that corresponds to the scenario and demands of artisanal fishing, the proposed method is based on the validation of the artisanal fisherman, distinguishing them from the industrial fishing activity. Four dimensions of analysis were proposed: Operational, Boat, Crew and Nature of Activity. From the analysis of each dimension, the fishery can be classified as Industrial, Transitional Industrial, Transitional Small-Scale and Small Scale. We performed the Artisanal Fishing Score(AFS) on a artisanal fishing community and they were categorized as small-scale by the method. We could infer that this is a trustable method to be implemented in certification process to improve communication between consumers and artisanal fish producers.</p>