Saving Seafood

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

Taiwan Seeks to Improve Conditions in Fishing Fleet

October 4th, 2016 — Commercial fishing boat owners in Taiwan, one of the world’s biggest seafood exporters, face strict rules and potential fines under a new law aimed at preventing overfishing and protecting migrant crewmembers who work far at sea with little oversight.

The Distant Water Fisheries Act, which takes effect Jan. 15, 2017, comes amid growing pressure on Taiwan’s seafood industry to crack down on modern-day slavery and other abuses for the more than 20,000 migrants working on the island’s fleet of fishing vessels.

Frances Lee, a spokeswoman for Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said new requirements for the foreign fishermen will include insurance, health care, wages, working hours and human rights.

Last year the European Union gave Taiwan a “yellow card” warning for failing to control illegal fishing on its commercial vessels, which sail around the world to catch some $2 billion a year worth of exported tuna and other seafood every year. Without improvements, Taiwan’s $14 million worth of seafood exports to the EU could face sanctions.

The U.S. State Department’s 2016 Trafficking in Persons report says that while Taiwan has cracked down on forced labor and sex trafficking, fishing vessels need more attention. The report says fishermen mostly from Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam have been fraudulently recruited to work on Taiwan-flagged vessels where they can face abuses including violence, limited food supplies and withheld wages.

The issues extend well beyond Taiwan. Commercial fishing boat owners around the world, including the U.S., recruit foreign crews for the dangerous and exhausting work of hauling in the catch. The migrant fishermen are vulnerable to human trafficking and other exploitation because the work takes place so remotely, far from police or labor officials, and they can remain offshore for years as their catch is shuttled in to port.

Several nonprofit advocacy groups including Greenpeace and the International Labour Organization have repeatedly raised concerns about working conditions for foreign crew in Taiwan’s fishing fleet.

Allison Lee at the Yilan Fishermen’s Labor Union, which represents migrant workers in Taiwan, said men have been beaten, overworked and denied pay on board boats.

Read the full story at The New York Times