May 14, 2024 — The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is pushing for a revision to a 15-year-old determination that child labor is prevalent in Thailand’s shrimp sector.
Thai shrimp were added to the DOL’s annual “List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor” since 2009, which requires importers to go through a series of additional checks to ensure forced or indentured child labor was not employed to produce any shrimp they buy from Thailand.
May 13, 2024 — As the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC) meets in Bangkok, Thailand, for its 28th session taking place 13 to 18 May, multiple industry groups and NGOs are urging the commission to tackle overfishing of yellowfin tuna.
The IOTC has been pressured to reduce the total allowable catch for yellowfin tuna for years, and at its 2023 meeting, the committee again failed to reach an agreement on skipjack or yellowfin tuna quotas, or on drifting fish aggregate devices (dFADs). The failure brought heavy criticism from multiple groups, and was in spite of a resolution in June 2021 to rebuild the yellowfin tuna stock.
April 30, 2024 — Companies implicated in illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing can have a serious impact on the economies, job opportunities and overall welfare of the developing countries in whose waters they operate, according to a recent report from London-based global affairs think tank the ODI.
The report, released Feb. 16, used consolidated fisheries and satellite data to gauge the economic damage done by fishing fleets with shady track records in five vulnerable countries: Ecuador, Ghana, Peru, the Philippines, and Senegal. It found that these companies’ fishing activities could be costing the five countries 0.26% of their combined GDP, leaving 30,174 people jobless and pushing 142,192 individuals deeper into poverty than they otherwise would be.
“In this report, we wanted to make a business case for sustainable fishing to show that it is in developing countries’ economic interests to have robust sustainable fishing policies,” Miren Gutierrez, study author and a professor of communication at the University of Deusto in Spain, told Mongabay. “This is crucial because the health of the oceans and the sustainability of fish stocks are directly linked to the activities of real companies and the people behind them.”
April 20, 2024 — Tensions in the Middle East continue to rise, leaving the global shipping sector in a state of uncertainty.
On 13 April, Iran seized control of a Portuguese-flagged container vessel, the MSC Aries, for “violating maritime laws,” according to a statement from Iran’s Foreign Ministry. The ship is partially owned by Israeli businessman Eyal Ofer, Reuters reported.
April 17, 2024 –A few months ago, along the coast of Andhra Pradesh in eastern India, Josh Farinella drove 40 minutes out of his way to visit workers who peel shrimp for Choice Canning, where he worked as a shrimp factory manager. He didn’t travel to the rural area for any of his job responsibilities; he was there to document injustice. He observed a crew of local women quickly peeling shrimp along rusty tables in 90-degree heat, wearing street clothes and flip-flops. They worked for long hours in a shed in a dirt field, far from the main work site, easily escaping the notice of auditors.
“These peeling sheds aren’t supposed to be there. They’re not supposed to be used by anybody,” Farinella told Civil Eats. “There are 20,000 pounds of shrimp per day going through these peeling sheds that are landing on U.S. grocery store shelves.” The high temperatures in the shed could easily lead to pathogen growth, he warned.
Farinella started his work for Choice Canning in 2015 at a production facility in his hometown of Pittston, Pennsylvania. In 2023, when the company offered him a high-paying managerial position at a new facility in Andhra Pradesh, he accepted. But four months into the job, he decided to come forward as a whistleblower, exposing what he says are the deplorable and unsanitary conditions in one of India’s largest shrimp manufacturers.
According to the company’s website, Choice Canning sells shrimp in more than 48,000 retail and food-service locations in the U.S. This includes major retailers like Walmart, Aldi, ShopRite, Hannaford, and HelloFresh, which advertise to consumers their commitments to sustainable seafood sourcing on their websites.
As Farinella was driving back to the town of Amalapuram, he recalled receiving a text from his wife with a photo of officers with machine guns outside their apartment. It was unusual timing. “It was one of those heart-beating-out-of-your-chest moments, like, does somebody know?” he said, worried that the company had caught on to his gathering dirt on its bad practices.
Soon after, Farinella quit his job, filed a complaint with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and flew back to the U.S. He took with him thousands of pages of documents, photographs, and videos, which have since been published by The Ocean Outlaw Project, alongside a vivid, reported account of his experiences at Choice Canning over the course of a few months of employment. According to the Project, this includes text messages that reveal that when Farinella informed the company’s vice president that shrimp had tested positive for antibiotics, which are banned in shrimp by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, he was told to “ship it” to the U.S. anyway.
April 16, 2024 — The Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) has issued a report alleging China’s distant-water fishing fleet in the Southwest Indian Ocean (SWIO) is connected to illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing and human rights abuses.
The report, “Tide of Injustice,” investigated China’s fleet in the region and interviewed migrant fishers onboard. According to the EJF, every single fisher the nonprofit interviewed reported witnessing either human rights abuses, illegal fishing, or both.
March 27, 2024 — The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) is planning to hit shrimp exporters in Ecuador, India, and Vietnam with higher countervailing duties once it posts its preliminary determinations to the Federal Register.
The DOC released its preliminary determinations on 26 March, finding the three countries, as well as individual companies in those countries, benefited from subsidies that gave them an unfair advantage in the U.S. market between 1 January and 31 December 2022.
March 26, 2024 — Cooke Chile, the Chilean aquaculture branch of Canadian seafood firm Cooke, has begun to harvest what it says is the country’s first organically farmed Atlantic salmon.
The organic salmon has been certified under regulations from the European Commission and Great Britain for sale in the European Union. The company said production will initially make up a quarter of Cooke’s total salmon production in Chile.
March 25, 2024 — India is one of the largest producing countries of shrimp, exporting 653 million pounds to the U.S. alone in 2023, which represents 37.6% of imports. But now, the industry is facing some serious allegations. This week the Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL), the Associated Press (AP), and the Outlaw Ocean Project (OOP) have all accused India’s shrimp industry of human rights and environmental abuses.
On Wednesday CAL released their report titled “Hidden Harvest: Human Rights and Environmental Abuses in India’s Shrimp Industry.” The 97-page document, which is based on over 150 interviews with workers and other stakeholders, sheds light on abusive conditions, forced labor, environmental harms and certification schemes.
“Human rights and environmental abuses in global shrimp aquaculture have been documented for over a decade,” the press release from CAL explains. “Yet, India— despite its huge market share—has remained under the radar. Indian shrimp have been considered a “low-risk” source, even with telltale signs of abuse. CAL’s multi-year field investigations and interviews provide some of the first documentation of the widespread abusive and dangerous labor and environmental practices in the Indian shrimp sector—including shrimp products certified to be socially and environmentally responsible by the industry’s largest certification programs.”
March 23, 2024 — Separate reports from the Corporate Accountability Lab, the Associated Press, and the Outlaw Ocean Project investigating labor and food safety issues in India’s shrimp sector have elicited a vociferous response from the seafood industry at large.
Sysco, Great American Seafood, Rich Products, Walmart, Eastern Fish Company, and Nekkanti Sea Foods issued statements outlining their buying policies and/or addressing particular issues raised by the AP article. Sysco said it has suspended its purchases of shrimp from Nekkanti pending an internal investigation into the company’s alleged use of a third-party peeling shed, which is not permitted under Sysco policy. US Foods, Aldi, Costco, Hannaford, Kroger, Stop & Shop, Walmart, and Whole Foods, Red Lobster, and the Cheesecake Factory were also named as buying shrimp from Nekkanti, as listed on Nekkanti’s website.
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