March 23, 2015 — The local-food movement has gained steam in recent years, particularly in small, younger-skewing cities such as Portland, Oregon and my hometown of Portland, Maine. But it is spreading across the nation too. As the movement gains supporters, including First Lady Michelle Obama, Americans are more frequently asking about the source and quality of their food. This is a relatively simple question to answer when it comes to farm-raised protein sources such as beef, pork, and the pampered pullet of “Portlandia.” Seafood, however, is an entirely different animal.
Fortunately, as the first lady has taken her healthy eating message to the masses, her husband has been working to shore up the nation’s seafood tracking systems. During a March 15 appearance at Seafood Expo North America in Boston, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and the U.S. Department of State released an action plan outlining how the recommendations of the 19-agency Presidential Task Force on Combatting IUU Fishing and Seafood Fraud will be implemented. In short, President Barack Obama is giving seafood lovers a much clearer picture of what eventually makes it onto their plates.
The actions initiated by this plan fall into two separate categories: addressing illegal, unregulated, and unreported, or IUU, fishing—which primarily happens among foreign fleets and in international waters—and increasing consumers’ ability to trace all aspects of their fish from bait to plate. This particularly applies to roughly 90 percent of the seafood imported from foreign vessels and processing facilities.
IUU fishing—sometimes referred to in more colorful terms as black market or pirate fishing—is truly a scourge. The pirate moniker evokes rogue vessels plundering the ocean of its bounty by fishing beyond sustainable limits, and indeed, this occurs on a grand scale: According to NOAA, IUU fishing costs honest fishermen anywhere from $10 billion to $23 billion annually. Such activities can also encompass even darker crimes, including human trafficking and slave labor.
Laudable work by the Environmental Justice Foundation and other organizations has unearthed harrowing stories of abducted workers sold into slave labor, primarily to Thai vessels. At sea, the captains target low-value ocean species that are only suitable to be ground into fishmeal and used as feed for southeast Asian shrimp farms that primarily serve the U.S. and European markets. The laborers are physically abused and, in some cases, worked literally to death aboard boats that fish perpetually without returning to port, using tenders to resupply and transport the fishmeal to market. This leaves the workers with no chance of escape, particularly since many of them had never seen the ocean before, let alone learned how to swim.
Read the full story at the Center for American Progress