Saving Seafood

Poll: Americans say seafood should not be caught using slave labor, illegal fishing

January 28, 2021 — The following was released by Oceana:

Oceana today released the results of a nationwide poll finding that Americans overwhelmingly support policies to end illegal fishing and seafood fraud. Included among the key findings, 89% of voters agree that imported seafood should be held to the same standards as U.S. caught seafood. Additionally, 81% of voters say they support policies that prevent seafood from being sold in the U.S. that was caught using human trafficking and slave labor. 83% agree that all seafood should be traceable from the fishing boat to the dinner plate, and 77% support requirements for all fishing vessels to be publicly trackable.

“American consumers shouldn’t have to worry if their seafood was caught illegally or fished using forced labor. All seafood sold in the U.S. should be safe, legally caught, responsibly sourced and honestly labeled,” said Beth Lowell, Oceana’s deputy vice president for U.S. campaigns. “It’s clear that Americans want and need to know more about the seafood they’re eating. President Biden and his administration have an opportunity to lead in the fight against illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing while leveling the playing field for American fishers and seafood businesses while protecting consumers. It’s a win for everyone.”

Key findings among registered voters include:

  • 87% agree that seafood caught using human trafficking and slave labor should not be bought or sold in the U.S.
  • 92% agree that consumers should be confident in the seafood they eat, including that it is safe, legally caught, honestly labeled and responsibly sourced.
  • 90% agree that seafood mislabeling is unfair for honest fishers, suppliers and restaurants that honestly label their seafood.
  • 75% want to know more about the seafood they eat, including what fish it is and where and how it was caught.
  • 60% say they are willing to pay more to ensure their seafood was not caught illegally.
  • 87% agree that the government needs to do more to ensure that consumers are purchasing properly labeled seafood.
  • Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly agree that the government needs to do more to protect consumers and to implement policies that end illegal fishing. The findings show strong bipartisan agreement on all major issues and policies that address ending illegal fishing.
    • Eight in ten Republicans (79%) and Democrats (83%) support ensuring all seafood in the U.S. is legally caught.
    • 91% of Democrats and 85% of Republicans agree that the U.S. Government needs to do more to ensure that consumers are purchasing properly labeled seafood.
    • Eight in ten Democrats (82%) and Republicans (77%) support requirements for fishing vessels to be publicly trackable.
    • 84% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats agree that seafood should be traceable from the fish boat to the dinner plate.
    • 89% of Democrats and 87% of Republicans agree that seafood caught using human trafficking and slave labor should not be bought or sold in the U.S.

“Americans overwhelmingly agree that consumers should be confident in the seafood they eat, including that it’s safe, legally caught, honestly labeled and responsibly sourced,” said Lowell. “Unfortunately, current policies don’t go far enough to prevent illegally caught seafood from entering the U.S. market. But the solutions are simple and widely supported – all fishing vessels should be publicly trackable, and all seafood should be traceable from the boat (or farm) to the dinner plate. Now is the time to finally remove the U.S. from inadvertently supporting the worldwide web of illegal fishing, slave labor and human trafficking. These are issues that Americans on both sides of the aisle agree upon, and President Biden should build on the efforts of previous administrations to stamp out illegal fishing once and for all.”

According to Oceana, illegal fishing poses one of the greatest threats to our oceans. It is estimated that up to 30% of the seafood caught worldwide is a product of Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing, valued from $25 to $50 billion annually. In the United States, up to 90% of the fish consumed is imported, with up to one-third of wild-caught imports being sourced from IUU fishing. IUU fishing can include fishing without authorization, ignoring catch limits, operating in closed areas, and fishing with illegal gear or for prohibited fish or wildlife. These illicit activities can destroy essential habitat, severely deplete fish populations, and threaten global food security. These actions not only contribute to overfishing, but also give illegal fishermen an unfair advantage over those that play by the rules. It also undermines the responsible management of commercial fishing and ocean conservation.

Forced labor and human rights abuses are also commonly associated with IUU fishing. IUU fishing is a low-risk, high-reward activity, especially on the high seas where a fragmented legal framework and lack of effective enforcement allows it to thrive. In 2018, the federal government required catch documentation and traceability for seafood at risk of illegal fishing and seafood fraud, but the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) currently only applies to 13 types of imported fish and only traces them from the boat to the U.S. border. In 2019, Oceana released the results of a seafood fraud investigation, testing popular seafood not covered by SIMP and found that 1 in every 5 fish tested nationwide was mislabeled. Seafood fraud ultimately hurts honest fishermen and seafood businesses that play by the rules, masks conservation and health risks of certain species, and cheats consumers who fall victim to a bait-and-switch.

The national online poll, conducted by the non-partisan polling company Ipsos, surveyed 1,005 American adults from across the U.S. between December 11 and 14, 2020, and found widespread bipartisan support for policies aimed at increasing transparency and seafood traceability.

Oceana is campaigning to stop illegal fishing, increase transparency at sea, and require traceability of all seafood to ensure that all seafood is safe, legally caught, responsibly sourced and honestly labeled.

View the full polling results here.

Slavery risk warning over UK’s scallop fisheries

Register singles out industry with retailers told to check suppliers are clear of any link to bonded labour

February 2, 2018 — Marine conservation campaigners have warned there is a critical risk that slaves are being used on British scallop fishing boats, and urged retailers to be on their guard.

A new slavery risk register published in the US on Thursday has singled out the UK’s queen and giant scallops fisheries as the most at risk of modern slavery after a Guardian investigation found allegations of bonded labour in the industry.

Nine African and Asian crew were taken off a pair of British scallop trawlers in Portsmouth in December as suspected victims of modern slavery, and two skippers, one from Scotland and the second from Merseyside, were detained by police.

The register, compiled by Monterey Bay Aquarium – one of the most prominent conservation campaigns in the US – the anti-slavery group Liberty Asia and the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, also cites other alleged cases of suspected slavery involving migrant labour in Scotland and southern England in 2017, 2014 and 2012.

Read the full story at the Guardian

 

Why the West should care about Thailand’s new fight against fishing slavery

August 23, 2017 — Thailand’s $7 billion fishing trade is among the world’s biggest. In recent years, it’s also been one of the most severely scandalized — an industry blighted by reports of slavery on fishing trawlers. Many of these tales recall 18th century-style barbarity at sea.

Each year, Thailand’s docks have traditionally launched thousands of trawlers into the ocean, often with crews of roughly 20 men. Most are not complicit in forced labor. But less scrupulous captains have taken advantage of the ocean’s lawlessness.

In port cities, they’ve bought men from Myanmar and Cambodia for $600 to $1,000 per head. Duped by traffickers, the migrants come to Thailand seeking under-the-table work in factories or farms.

Instead, they’ve found themselves hustled onto fishing boats that motor into the abyss, thousands of miles from civilization, where they are forced to fish for no pay. Various investigations have uncovered thousands of cases.

As one deputy boat captain of a Thai trawler told GlobalPost: “Once a captain is tired of a [captive], he’s sold to another captain for profit. A guy can be out there for 10 years just getting sold over and over.”

But Thailand is now installing a new system that — if effective — could seriously reform an industry that has been murky for far too long.

“We’re trying to change as fast as possible,” says Adisorn Promthep, director general of Thailand’s Department of Fisheries. “We want to make sure no vessel escapes our scope.”

Installed last year by Thailand’s military government, Adisorn is charged with bringing transparency to a business marked by opacity.

Read the full story at Public Radio International

 

Hidden no more: First-ever global view of transshipment in commercial fishing industry

February 22, 2017 — Transshipment, the transfer of goods from one boat to another, is a major pathway for illegally caught and unreported fish to enter the global seafood market. It has also been associated with drug smuggling and slave labor. Illegal in many cases, transshipment has been largely invisible and nearly impossible to manage, because it often occurs far from shore and out of sight. Until now.

Today, with the release of our report, The Global View of Transshipment: Preliminary Findings, we present the first-ever global footprint of transshipment in the fishing industry. The report explains how data scientists from SkyTruth and Global Fishing Watch (a partnership of Oceana, SkyTruth and Google) analyzed Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals from ships at sea to developed a tool to identify and track 90 percent of the world’s large refrigerated cargo vessels, ships that collect catch from multiple fishing boats at sea and carry it to port.

According to the analysis, from 2012 through 2016, refrigerated cargo vessels, known as “reefers,” participated in more than 5,000 likely transshipments (instances in which they rendezvoused with an AIS-broadcasting fishing vessel and drifted long enough to receive a catch). In addition, the data revealed more than 86,000 potential transshipments in which reefers exhibited transshipment-like behavior, but there were no corresponding AIS signals from . Brian Sullivan, Google’s lead for Global Fishing Watch, will present the findings at the Economist World Ocean Summit in Indonesia today. The report, along with the underlying data and our list of likely and suspected transshipments, will be freely available on our website, globalfishingwatch.org.

The global scale of transshipment and its ability to facilitate suspicious activity, such as illegal fishing and human rights abuses, is exposed in a complementary report being issued today by our partners at Oceana. The opportunity for mixing legal and illegal catch during the collection of from multiple fishing boats provides an easy route for illegal players to get their product to market. This obscures the seafood supply chain from hook to port and hobbles efforts at sustainability because it prevents an accurate measurement of the amount of marine life being taken from the sea.

Read the full story at Phys.org

HAWAII: Longline association slams AP article claiming slavery

February 4, 2017 — A Hawaii Industry Task Force is firing back at the Associated Press after a September article accusing the local long-line fishing industry of slavery and human-trafficking.

The article implies that some foreign crewmen working on Hawaii fishing boats were undocumented are treated unfairly when it comes to pay rates and are kept as prisoners on their boats even while docked in Honolulu.

After conducting its investigation the task force found that all crewmen onboard those boats have documentation and are allowed off of their boats while docked.

Read the full story at KITV. 

New AP story finds labor issues persist in Thai seafood industry

September 29, 2016 — A new Associated Press story explores progress made in the past year in reforming abusive labor practices in the shrimp processing sector in Thailand.

The article, “Promises unmet as Thailand tries to reform shrimp industry,” published 22 September, investigates the the difficulties faced by the industry in attempting to implement reforms. The article follows up on a March 2015 AP investigation titled “Seafood from Slaves,” which detailed the use of human trafficking, forced labor and violence against workers in the Thai seafood industry.

“The Associated Press…found that while some Thai companies that export shrimp to the U.S. have given formerly entrapped workers better jobs in-house, others still use middlemen who employ laborers in remote, guarded warehouses,” the AP reported in its new article. “That’s despite industry vows to end outside shrimp processing by the end of last year after human trafficking was exposed in the sheds.”

The owners of these sheds still disregard environmental, labor or safety laws, with 75 percent of the 109 sheds inspected so far this year receiving citations for violations and 24 were ordered to close, the AP reported.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

EU probes illegal fishing, slave labor before Thai ruling

BRUSSELS (AP) — October 1, 2015 — The European Union is including Thailand’s actions to stamp out slave labor in the fishing industry during its investigation whether to impose sanctions on the major fish-exporting nation for failing to crack down on illegal and unregulated fishing.

The EU is expected to rule by the end of the year whether to impose an EU seafood import ban on Thailand and is in negotiations with Bangkok on amending a series of fishing practices which it considers as seriously contributing to the depletion of fish stocks.

The EU has successfully forced several nations to change its fisheries policies, but in the case of Thailand though, it is also looking into the social conditions of some fishermen that many have called slavery.

An AP investigation has shown that enslaved fishermen are routinely hauled from Thailand to work on smaller Thai trawlers in foreign waters where they are given little or no pay. Hundreds of former slaves told AP they were beaten or witnessed other crew members being attacked. They were routinely denied medicine, forced to work 22-hour shifts with no days off and given inadequate food and water.

“We are very concerned about the situation, both at the level of fishing and slavery. And we think we have to deal with both issues,” a senior EU fisheries official said on condition of anonymity because the talks with the Thai authorities were still ongoing.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Jersey Herald

Indonesia Navy Nabs Cargo Ship Loaded With Slave-Caught Fish

August 13, 2015 — JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — A massive refrigerated cargo ship believed to be loaded with slave-caught fish was seized by Indonesia’s navy and brought to shore Thursday, after The Associated Press informed authorities it had entered the country’s waters.

The Thai-owned Silver Sea 2 was located late Wednesday and escorted about 80 miles (130 kilometers) to a naval base in Sabang on the Indonesian archipelago’s northwestern tip, said Col. Sujatmiko, the local naval chief.

The AP used a satellite beacon signal to trace its path from Papua New Guinea waters, where it was also being sought, into neighboring Indonesia. The navy then spent a week trying to catch it. The ship was close to leaving Indonesian waters by the time it was finally seized.

“I’m so overwhelmed with happiness,” said Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti, adding it was difficult to find because the boat’s signal had a delay. “It was almost impossible, but we did it.”

The Silver Sea 2 is the same 2,285-ton vessel captured in a high-resolution satellite photo last month in Papua New Guinea showing its hold open and two fishing trawlers tethered to each side, loading fish. Analysts identified the smaller trawlers as among those that fled the remote Indonesian island village of Benjina earlier this year, crewed by enslaved men from poor Southeast Asian countries who are routinely beaten and forced to work nearly nonstop with little or no pay.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times 

AP investigation tracked to Papua New Guinea; 8 enslaved fishermen rescued so far

July 31, 2015 — Authorities in Papua New Guinea have rescued eight fishermen held on board a Thai-owned refrigerated cargo ship, and dozens of other boats are still being sought in response to an Associated Press report that included satellite photos and locations of slave vessels at sea.

Two Burmese and six Cambodian men have been removed from the Blissful Reefer, a massive quarter-acre transport ship now impounded in Daru, Papua New Guinea, about 120 miles (200 kilometers) north of Australia. Officials said the fishermen appeared to be part of a larger group of forced laborers being transported from Thailand to be distributed onto various fishing boats, said George Gigauri, head of the International Organization for Migration in Port Moresby, which has assisted with the operation. He added that nearly 20 other crewmembers from the Blissful Reefer have not yet been questioned, and that if victims of trafficking are found, “there are lives at risk.”

The men are part of a seemingly inexhaustible supply of poor migrants from Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos who are forced to fish for the Thai seafood industry. When workers run away, become sick or even die, they are easily replaced by new recruits who are tricked or coerced by false promises of jobs in Thailand.

The story of Aung San Win, 19, who was among the rescued men, started the same way as with hundreds of other enslaved fishermen interviewed in person or in writing by AP during a year-long investigation into slavery at sea. He said a broker came to his home in Myanmar and convinced him and several other young men to go to Thailand where they could find good work in factories. But when they arrived, their passports and identification cards were taken. They were then pushed onto boats and told they would have to fish for three years and owed nearly $600 for their documents, he said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News and World Report

 

Thai Government Says Latest US Report Ignores “Tangible Progress” in Combating Slavery

July 28, 2015– BANGKOK — Thailand has hit back after being blacklisted in a US report for the second consecutive year for not combatting modern-day slavery, arguing it has made serious steps to tackle human trafficking.

The ministry of foreign affairs said the US state department’s annual Trafficking in Persons report, released on Monday, “does not accurately reflect the significant efforts undertaken by the government”, which had made “tangible progress”.

Bangkok has been lobbying for an upgrade from the lowest tier 3 rank in the report. Under US law, countries on tier 3 could trigger non-trade-related sanctions such as access to the World Bank and bars on US foreign assistance.

Thailand has pressed charges against more than 100 people, including an army general, on counts of human trafficking after dozens of bodies were found in a jungle prison camp earlier this year.

“Relevant agencies [have] intensified their efforts, which led to the crackdowns of trafficking syndicates as well as many arrests and punishments of high-ranking officials complicit in human trafficking,” the ministry said.

Read the full story at The Guardian