Saving Seafood

Study develops new method for identifying risk of forced labor in seafood supply chains

July 26, 2018 –A recent study, published 25 July, has developed a method to identify areas with high risks of forced labor throughout the seafood supply chain.

Published in Science Advances, the study – over the course of five years – developed a framework with five separate components that can allow companies to “efficiently and effectively assess” the risk of forced labor in supply chains. The framework utilizes existing data on supply chains as well as some of the same traceability technologies used in food safety to track worker conditions.

“The seafood sector has among the world’s most complex supply chains and utilizes sophisticated technology to track food safety conditions,” said Dr. Katrina Nakamura, lead author of the study and co-founder of the Sustainability Incubator. “We wondered if the technology could also be used to collect data on working conditions. Our report shows the idea bears out. Companies in our study could see, for the first time, where conditions met minimum principles, were unknown, or were inadequate.”

Using data collected from UN institutions, NGOs, and seafood companies with interviews of workers on fishing vessels and in processing plants in Asia, the study developed a metric to identify working conditions in supply chains. Then, 18 seafood companies used the data to screen 118 products within the framework developed, which has been dubbed the “Labor Safe Screen” (LSS).

“Our findings also demonstrate that human rights due diligence may be added to fishing fleets and certification programs for seafood sustainability,” Dr. Nakamura said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

New Zealand Moves to Compensate Slave-Like Fishermen

March 12, 2018 — New Zealand lawyer Karen Harding has secured the first stage of review of existing New Zealand legislation to improve the working conditions of fishermen.

In particular, the move has given a lifeline to a group of Indonesian fishermen seeking compensation against their former South Korean employers for unpaid wages and slave-like treatment. The men reportedly worked up to 24 hour shifts with few breaks. They were forced to live in cockroach-riddled spaces, sleep in wet bedding and eat flea-ridden food, reports Radio New Zealand.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the men can claim proceeds from the sale of vessels seized by the government. The issues of the case required the Supreme Court to consider the relationship between the provisions of two separate pieces of legislation, the Fisheries Act and the Admiralty Act.

Harding has worked on the men’s case for several years without payment. “They were promised what were said to be good jobs, to come to New Zealand on work permits to work on these Korean fishing vessels. They came and they got raped, they got abused, they got molested, they had insects in their food, their rooms were full of cockroaches and mice.

Read the full story at the Maritime Executive

 

North Korean workers prep seafood going to US stores, restaurants

October 5, 2017 — HUNCHUN, China — The workers wake up each morning on metal bunk beds in fluorescent-lit Chinese dormitories, North Koreans outsourced by their government to process seafood that ends up in American stores and homes.

Privacy is forbidden. They cannot leave their compounds without permission. They must take the few steps to the factories in pairs or groups, with North Korean minders ensuring no one strays. They have no access to telephones or email. And they are paid a fraction of their salaries, while the rest — as much as 70 percent — is taken by North Korea’s government.

This means Americans buying salmon for dinner at Walmart or ALDI may inadvertently have subsidized the North Korean government as it builds its nuclear weapons program, an AP investigation has found. Their purchases may also have supported what the United States calls “modern day slavery” — even if the jobs are highly coveted by North Koreans.

At a time when North Korea faces sanctions on many exports, the government is sending tens of thousands of workers worldwide, bringing in revenue estimated at anywhere from $200 million to $500 million a year. That could account for a sizable portion of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs, which South Korea says have cost more than $1 billion.

While the presence of North Korean workers overseas has been documented, the AP investigation reveals for the first time that some products they make go to the United States, which is now a federal crime. AP also tracked the products made by North Korean workers to Canada, Germany and elsewhere in the European Union.

Besides seafood, AP found North Korean laborers making wood flooring and sewing garments in factories in Hunchun. Those industries also export to the U.S. from Hunchun, but AP did not track specific shipments except for seafood.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

Blue Boat Captains Held In Solomons Claims They Are Trafficking Victims

July 6, 2017 — The three captains of the blue boats who entered our waters and stole our marine resources say they are victims of human trafficking.

This was revealed yesterday by their lawyer Public Solicitor Douglas Hou in the High Court during the mitigation and sentencing submissions of their case.

Mr Hou also told the court upon the instructions of Do Van Va, Vo Van Vi, and Nguyen Nguyen that they are not captains of the three blue boats but were merely operating the vessel at that time when they were caught.

“The whole team could actually navigate the vessel,” Mr Hou said in mitigation.

“These three accused are the unfortunate ones tasked to operate the vessel when they were caught.”

He submitted that the period served in custody should not be long as it would be unfair on the three accused now victims as other crew members of the blue boats had already went home.

He said all 40 crew members who have already returned to Vietnam and these three accused have equal roles in operating the boats and it would be unfair for the three accused if they served long period in prison.

Mr Hou said the three accused are victims of human trafficking used by the owners of the blue boats.

Read the full story at the Pacific Islands Report

Can Sustainability Commitments Get Slavery Out of Seafood?

June 30, 2017 — In 2015, more than 2,000 enslaved fishermen were rescued from brutal conditions in the seas around Indonesia. Some had been savagely beaten while others had been kept in cages. Slave labor was found off these fishing boats as well: In one scenario, seafood workers were forced to peel frozen shrimp for 16 hours a day.

Wracked by these and other stories in the Pulitzer Prize-winning series from the Associated Press chronicling slavery, abysmal working conditions, and restricted freedoms, the extent of the abuse was shocking given the seafood industry’s recent global focus on environmental sustainability. However, existing seafood labels—most notably, the blue Marine Steward Council label—focus almost exclusively on the management and environmental impact of fisheries. These traceability standards largely neglect workforce concerns.

Early actions from the complex web of seafood suppliers, distributors, and retailers to address human rights abuses were fragmented and ineffective at best. For example, a European Union threat to ban seafood imports from Thailand led Thai authorities to enact legislation to combat illegal fishing and prevent underage labor, and arrest more than 100 people on human rights violations. But watchdog groups continued to find abuses months later.

Over the last year, members of social responsibility and environmental non-governmental organizations met with leading academics and business leaders to hash out key elements necessary to achieve socially responsible seafood. The primary objectives—protecting human rights, ensuring equitable production, and improving food security for resource-dependent communities—were detailed at the beginning of June in the journal Science.

“It’s not enough to be slavery-free,” said Jack Kittinger, senior director of the Global Fisheries and Aquaculture Program at Conservation International and co-author of the paper. “There are other social issues—notably gender equity and livelihood security—that need to be tackled as well,” he added.

Read the full story at Civil Eats

Corporate Coordination Can Stop Seafood Slavery

April 4, 2017 — In 2015, media investigations revealed horrific occurrences of physical and emotional violence, human trafficking, and murder on fishing vessels and in shrimp processing facilities primarily in Southeast Asia. The stories sent shockwaves through the seafood industry, but despite efforts by several companies to combat these abuses, seafood slavery persists and will continue to erode consumer trust without a more comprehensive response. At a moment when many U.S. policymakers and ordinary citizens are voicing skepticism over U.S. participation in a globalized economy, now is the time for the international seafood industry to take robust and unified steps toward a transparent and traceable seafood supply chain.

The U.S. Department of State has identified seafood-related human trafficking in more than 65 countries over the past half-decade, many of which supply seafood to the United States, including major exporters such as Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. The paths by which seafood from these countries enters the United States is complex and often opaque. There are numerous points along supply chains at which fish caught or processed using forced labor are mixed with responsibly caught fish—some occurring even before the fish first hit dry land. For example, vessels will often offload their catch onto a supply ship in exchange for provisions and fuel, where it commingles with fish from other vessels. This practice, known as transshipment at sea, allows fishing boats to stay offshore for months—or even years—at a time, keeping laborers from escaping from what amount to floating prisons.

The international seafood supply chain is composed of tens of millions of people moving 158 million metric tons of fish and shellfish annually. This complexity alone poses a serious obstacle to eliminating slave-caught seafood from the U.S. market. The solution is not as straightforward as simply refusing to buy fish from boats with slaves on board. And yet, despite the complicated nature of the problem, the industry must address these abuses. The United States is the second-largest seafood importer after the European Union, and U.S. importers and retailers have a crucial role to play in the global fight against trafficking in persons and other labor abuses.

Read the full story at the Center for American Progress

Fish caught by slaves may be tainting your cat food

January 3, 2017 — Crack open a can of seafood-flavored cat food and whiff that fishy broth. Now try to guess where those gloopy bits of meat originate.

It’s a futile task. Oftentimes, no one knows quite how they got there, or who hauled those fish aboard which boat. Not even the multinational corporations who sell it on supermarket shelves.

Sure, pet food conglomerates can tell you which factories ground up the fish. They know who mixes in the additives, like tricalcium phosphate, and then dumps it into a can.

But the men who actually yanked it out of the sea? They’re usually anonymous, obscured by a murky supply chain.

That’s unfortunate. Because much of the pet food sold in the West is supplied by a Southeast Asian seafood industry, centered in Thailand, that is infamous for its use of forced labor.

For years, this industry has been scandalized by reports of human trafficking and even outright slavery. The victims are men from Myanmar and Cambodia, duped by human traffickers.

Here’s how the scam works. Traffickers promise desperate men a job on a factory or farm in Thailand — a relatively prosperous country compared to its poverty-stricken neighbors.

But there is no legit job. The victims are instead forced onto squalid trawlers. Once the boats leave port, they enter a lawless sea, and the men are forced to toil without pay — sometimes for years on end.

Read the full story at PRI

Costco Sued for Selling Slave-Labor Shrimp

August 19, 2015 — A new lawsuit filed against Costco takes the retailer to task for selling shrimp farmed by sea slaves in Thailand. The first of its kind, the class-action suit was filed by California resident Monica Sud, who argues that the Washington-based warehouse club has helped sustain the farmed-prawn industry through its purchasing power and that, furthermore, it hasn’t been honest with consumers about where its shrimp comes from. If true, doing so would violate California law, which requires companies to be honest about illegal conduct in their supply chains.

Several reports over the last year have revealed that horrid conditions and abusive labor practices are rampant in the Thai fishing industry, and that many Americans have very likely unwittingly purchased fish and shrimp produced using slave labor at chains including Costco, Safeway, and Walmart.

Read the full story at Grub Street

Crossing Borders and Defying Policing, Abuses of Thailand’s Fishing Industry Challenge International System

August 18, 2015 — Somewhere off the coast of Thailand, “ghost ships” bump and crash along the choppy waves scrapping the sea floor with nets that spare nothing. Pulling up these illegal hauls in shifts that sometimes last 20 hours are thousands of migrant fishermen, many of whom have been forced into indentured servitude or kidnapped. Far from shore on unregistered boats, they have little hope of escape and face daily abuse and squalid conditions. More recently, some captains have turned to trafficking Rohingya fleeing persecution in Myanmar, pressing some into service, extorting others, and taking sex slaves.

As explored in an investigative series in The New York Times and reporting by The Guardian and AP, a cycle of human rights abuses, environmental destruction, and impunity revolves around the fishing industry in Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand. What’s more, it’s in part due to growing demand from consumers around the world, like you and me.

Catch rates for the region’s fish have been decimated in recent years. The Environmental Justice Foundation reports Thailand’s fish stocks are 85 percent depleted compared to levels 50 years ago. The Times series follows boats that are now catching “trash fish” – small herring and jack mackerel that are processed into dogfood, fish oil, or feed for factory-farmed shrimp sold to companies like Walmart and Cost Co. But to make decent profits on these small fish, and what’s left of the bigger species, fishing boats need to work longer hours and move further out to sea.

Meanwhile, Thailand faces a major labor deficit, particularly in the maritime industry, where conditions and pay are poor. The fishing fleet is annually short as many as 60,000 workers. Combined, these pressures are pushing some captains to resort to kidnapping crewmembers from shore, spending longer and longer periods at sea, and even participating in human trafficking.

Read the full story at NewSecurityBeat.com

State Department watered down human trafficking report

August 3, 2015 — In the weeks leading up to a critical annual U.S. report on human trafficking that publicly shames the world’s worst offenders, human rights experts at the State Department concluded that trafficking conditions hadn’t improved in Malaysia and Cuba. And in China, they found, things had grown worse.

The State Department’s senior political staff saw it differently — and they prevailed.

A Reuters examination, based on interviews with more than a dozen sources in Washington and foreign capitals, shows that the government office set up to independently grade global efforts to fight human trafficking was repeatedly overruled by senior American diplomats and pressured into inflating assessments of 14 strategically important countries in this year’s Trafficking in Persons report.

In all, analysts in the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons – or J/TIP, as it’s known within the U.S. government — disagreed with U.S. diplomatic bureaus on ratings for 17 countries, the sources said.

The analysts, who are specialists in assessing efforts to combat modern slavery – such as the illegal trade in humans for forced labor or prostitution – won only three of those disputes, the worst ratio in the 15-year history of the unit, according to the sources.

As a result, not only Malaysia, Cuba and China, but countries such as India, Uzbekistan and Mexico, wound up with better grades than the State Department’s human-rights experts wanted to give them, the sources said. (Graphic looking at some of the key decisions here: reut.rs/1gF2Wz5)

Of the three disputes J/TIP won, the most prominent was Thailand, which has faced scrutiny over forced labor at sea and the trafficking of Rohingya Muslims through its southern jungles. Diplomats had sought to upgrade it to so-called “Tier 2 Watch List” status. It remains on “Tier 3” – the rating for countries with the worst human-trafficking records.

The number of rejected recommendations suggests a degree of intervention not previously known by diplomats in a report that can lead to sanctions and is the basis for many countries’ anti-trafficking policies. This year, local embassies and other constituencies within the department were able to block some of the toughest grades.

Read the full story at Reuters