February 27, 2024 — Trident Seafoods, High Liner Foods, and Sysco are among the U.S. seafood firms that have suspended relationships with Chinese processors named in the latest Outlaw Ocean Project report, which revealed their use of North Korean labor, in violation of U.N. sanctions and U.S. law.
The use of North Korean laborers was prohibited in 2017 by the United Nations Security Council in response to the country testing a series of nuclear and ballistic weapons, and the U.S. has also passed a law categorizing the use of North Korean labor as forced labor unless credibly proven otherwise. Despite that, Outlaw Ocean estimates more than 120,000 metric tons (MT) of seafood have been shipped from companies using North Korean laborers to American importers since 2017.