Saving Seafood

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

 

Lawsuit takes aim at kings of the tuna industry

June 5, 2017 — Clandestine phone calls. Surreptitious emails. In-person meetings to avoid a paper trail.

The purpose of all the secrecy? To keep the price on packaged tuna — the quick source of protein found in cans and pouches — artificially high.

New details of exactly how the country’s three largest tuna companies, including Pittsburgh’s StarKist Co., allegedly spent years sharing information and collaborating are included in a pile of amended complaints submitted last month in federal court by numerous grocers, restaurants and suppliers.

It’s the latest round in an ongoing court battle alleging price fixing in the packaged seafood industry. Bumble Bee Foods and Tri-Union Seafoods, which trades under Chicken of the Sea, both based in San Diego, are also named.

The U.S. Department of Justice, which is conducting its own investigation into alleged price fixing in the industry, announced in early May that Bumble Bee Foods agreed to pay a $25 million fine after pleading guilty to conspiring with competitors to fix prices. The DOJ said the company also is cooperating with the antitrust investigation. It’s the third charge to be filed in the investigation.

The DOJ had released information that triggered the amended complaints, according to one attorney.

A spokesperson for Starkist, Chicken of the Sea and Bumble Bee declined to comment on pending litigation, but in 2016 attorneys representing StarKist urged the court to dismiss the case. They argued that it’s not unusual for people working in the same industry to know each other and to meet at industry gatherings.

But a lot of retailers are arguing that the evidence shows the exchanges were not so innocent.

The latest court documents — which are heavily redacted — include details such as Walmart and Ohio-based grocer Kroger charging that executives “used misleading subject lines on emails to affirmatively conceal the conspiratorial nature of their communications from those not involved in the conspiracy.”

Read the full story at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette