Since the mid 1990s there has been a concerted effort to encourage fisheries sustainability by targeting large scale, high catch fisheries and by raising consumer awareness. Because of the often slow pace of regulatory approaches, this voluntary market-oriented effort has been restructured so as to avoid government involvement. Although ssf are potentially and in many cases actually more sustainable than large-scale fisheries, they are disadvantaged because of their typical remoteness, lack of infrastructure and marginal political power. The paper discusses a recent additional barrier to trade from well-intentioned sustainable fisheries initiatives such as ecolabelling. The paper discusses the problem of data poverty in fisheries such as the ssf because of which sustainability criteria are difficult to define.