Saving Seafood

NGOs, businesses urge US Labor Department include distant-water fishing in forced labor list

December 17, 2019 — Greenpeace USA, AFL-CIO, Human Rights Watch, Environmental Justice Foundation, Whole Foods Market, and 19 other groups have sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Labor requesting the organization end its practice of only considering a country’s territorial waters when creating its List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor.

The letter, sent to Marcia Eugenio – the director of the Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor, and Human Trafficking for the Bureau of International Affairs with the Department of Labor – comes in the wake of a damning report by Greenpeace identifying forced labor issues in Southeast Asia. The new report includes accusations of forced labor against 13 distant-water fishing vessels registered in China, Taiwan, Vanuatu, and Fiji.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Human rights groups criticize MSC’s new Chain of Custody Standard

June 11, 2019 — Thirteen human rights and environmental groups have released a statement criticizing the effectiveness of the Marine Stewardship Council’s new Chain of Custody Standard.

The 13 groups – including Human Rights Watch, Greenpeace, Freedom Fund, the International Labor Rights Forum, and more – have criticized the program’s new standard, saying that the standards will not be effective enough to identify and protect seafood workers from labor rights violations and abuse. The groups, which are a part of the Thai Seafood Working Group, have a number of concerns about the standard.

A key concern, according to the joint statement, is the classification of countries into “low-risk” and “high-risk” categories, with due diligence in certification required only in “high-risk” countries.

“The way that MSC defines the criteria for risk will allow seafood operations that may have serious labor abuses – such as processing and shrimp-peeling facilities – to be certified without any labor due diligence simply because they are in countries classified as low risk,” ILRF Executive Director Judy Gearhart said in a release.

Another point of criticism is the process on-shore operators – like processing facilities – will need to undergo to obtain certification. The MSC standard is for companies to undergo one of three labor audits recognized by the organization: Amfori Business Social Compliance Initiative, SEDEX SMETA, or Social Accountability International’s SA8000.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Many in Thai fishing industry fail to see conditions as slavery: research

February 6, 2018 — NEW YORK — Thai fishing boat owners who trap workers on board ships and withhold wages often do not realize that is modern slavery, so authorities must ramp up their policing efforts, advocates say.

Research shows many fishing operators are oblivious that the grim conditions on board their ships amount to forced labor, according to a recent report.

Many operators know smuggling people across borders and forcing them to work at sea for long periods of time is wrong but see withholding documents or forcing them to pay off debts as acceptable, said the report by Issara Institute, a Bangkok-based anti-trafficking organization.

Thailand’s multibillion-dollar seafood sector has been the target of scrutiny in recent years following investigations that found slavery, trafficking and violence on fishing boats and in onshore processing facilities.

“Vessel owners exploit fishermen yet view themselves as benevolent patrons,” said the report, released last month, based on interviews with 75 Thai captains and large fishing boat owners.

The findings show a need for stronger efforts to improve the working conditions and bring the fishing industry in line with anti-trafficking laws, advocates said.

“It’s all going to come down to enforcement,” Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The military government in Thailand has rolled out industry reforms since the European Union in 2015 threatened to ban its fish imports, but little has changed, Human Rights Watch said in a report also released last month.

Shawn MacDonald, chief executive of Verite, a charity fighting labor injustices, said the Issara findings provide insight useful for crafting incentives against forced labor.

Read the full story at Reuters

Was Your Seafood Caught With Slave Labor? New Database Helps Retailers Combat Abuse

February 1, 2018 — The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, known best for its red, yellow and green sustainable seafood-rating scheme, is unveiling its first Seafood Slavery Risk Tool on Thursday. It’s a database designed to help corporate seafood buyers assess the risk of forced labor, human trafficking and hazardous child labor in the seafood they purchase.

The tool’s release comes on the heels of a new report that confirms forced labor and human rights abuses remain embedded in Thailand’s fishing industry, years after global media outlets first documented the practice.

The 134-page report by Human Rights Watch shows horrific conditions continue. That’s despite promises from the Thai government to crack down on abuses suffered by mostly migrants from countries like Myanmar and Cambodia — and despite pressure from the U.S. and European countries that purchase much of Thailand’s seafood exports. (Thailand is the fourth-largest seafood exporter in the world).

For U.S. retailers and seafood importers, ferreting slavery out of the supply chain has proved exceedingly difficult. Fishing occurs far from shore, often out of sight, while exploitation and abuse on vessels stem from very complex social and economic dynamics.

“Companies didn’t know how to navigate solving the problem,” says Sara McDonald, Seafood Watch project manager for the Slavery Risk Tool.

The new Seafood Watch database, which took two years to design, assigns slavery risk ratings to specific fisheries and was developed in collaboration with Liberty Asia and the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership. Like Seafood Watch’s color-coded ratings, the Seafood Slavery Risk Tool aims to keep it simple — a set criteria determines whether a fishery will earn a critical, high, moderate or low risk rating.

A “critical risk” rating, for example, means credible evidence of forced labor or child labor has been found within the fishery itself. Albacore, skipjack and yellowfin tuna caught by the Taiwanese fleet gets a critical risk rating. A “low risk” fishery, like Patagonian toothfish in Chile (also known as Chilean seabass), is one with good regulatory protections and enforcement, with no evidence of abuses in related industries.

Read the full story at National Public Radio

 

Rights Abuses Still ‘Widespread’ In Thailand’s Fishing Industry, Report Says

January 23, 2018 — Forced labor, human trafficking and other rights abuses are “widespread” in the Thai fishing industry, according to a new Human Rights Watch report that provides an update on a sector that has been cited for enabling slavery conditions.

In recent years, reports have emerged that detail forced labor and confinement on ships that make up Thailand’s large fishing fleet, where migrants from Thailand’s neighbors, such as Myanmar and Cambodia, are often victimized. Past reports have found prison-like conditions; the new report details how workers are often paid below the minimum wage, are not paid on time, and are held in debt.

Despite scrutiny from U.S. and European monitors and the Thai government’s public promises to clamp down, the abuses remain a big part of Thailand’s fishing industry, according to the report.

From Bangkok, Michael Sullivan reports for NPR’s Newscast unit:

“Under Thai law, migrant laborers are not entitled to Thai labor law protection. …

“The European Union has warned Thailand it could face a seafood export ban and the U.S. has placed Thailand on the Tier 2 Watch List in its latest trafficking in persons report.”

The 134-page report from Human Rights Watch is titled “Hidden Chains: Forced Labor and Rights Abuses in Thailand’s Fishing Industry. Compiled from interviews with 248 current and former fishers, it includes several quotes from workers.

“I didn’t know what was going on when I arrived,” trafficked Burmese worker Bang Rin said in March of 2016. “They just put me in a lockup, and it was only when the boat came in that I realized that was where I’d have to work. I went to do my pink card application on the 4th, and on the 5th I was out on the boat.”

The HRW says the research was conducted from 2015 to 2017, when its staff members visited all of Thailand’s major fishing ports.

Read the full story at New England Public Radio (NEPR)

 

Tech solutions to tackle overfishing, labor abuse at sea

November 28th, 2016 — Fishing boats used high-tech systems to find vast schools of fish for decades, depleting stocks of some species and leading to the complete collapse of others. Now more than a dozen apps, devices and monitoring systems aimed at tracking unscrupulous vessels and the seafood they catch are being rolled out — high-tech solutions some say could also help prevent labor abuse at sea.

Illegal fishing, which includes catching undersized fish, exceeding quotas and casting nets in protected areas, leads to an estimated $23 billion in annual losses, according to the United Nations. Meanwhile, overfishing close to shore has pushed boats farther out, where there are few laws and even less enforcement to protect workers from abuse. Slavery has been documented in the fishing sectors of more than 50 countries, according to U.S. State Department reports.

Earlier this year, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said using technology at sea could eventually mean “there is not one square mile of ocean where we cannot prosecute and hold people accountable…”

However, Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, cautions that catching human traffickers goes beyond finding boats.

Read the full story at WRAL