Saving Seafood

Report finds unexplained deaths, evidence of abuse among SPRFMO-registered vessels

February 26, 2025 — The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), a global federation of transport workers’ trade unions, has found evidence of worker exploitation and abuse on vessels registered with the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization (SPRFMO).

The ITF report, which was compiled from case studies focused on crime onboard vessels largely operating on what the report called “the squid route” in the Southwest Atlantic and Southeast Pacific between 2013 and 2023, found that crew deaths occurred as much as one every two months in the 10 years the report studied.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Philippine fishermen stranded at sea by pandemic: ‘We think about jumping overboard’

September 11, 2020 — Anthony Medina’s daughter was 5 months old when he left the Philippines and set sail for the Indian Ocean in December 2018 on an odyssey where his livelihood collided with a pandemic that has kept him adrift at sea and exiled from home.

For more than a year, his days have been a monotonous blur of endless fishing on the Oceanstar 86, a 465-foot-long vessel with a crew of about three dozen. As long as there was seafood for their nets, including tuna, crab and squid, the crew members had to haul them in, clean and freeze them.

When their boat arrived in Singapore in March, Medina planned on catching a flight home. But he was shocked to learn that a virus outbreak had closed borders and shuttered ports, keeping him out of the Philippines and trapped on the fishing boat.

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times