Saving Seafood

Indonesia issues long-delayed rules to protect migrant fishing workers

June 14, 2022 — Indonesia has issued a much-anticipated decree to boost the protection of Indonesian deckhands working aboard foreign commercial and fishing vessels.

The move comes in response to a pending lawsuit accusing the government of failing to enshrine protections that could have prevented a long history of abusive and even deadly treatment of these sailors.

The government says the regulation ratified on June 8 by the administration of President Joko Widodo is designed to streamline the recruitment and placement process of Indonesian migrant deckhands, and improve measures to protect their labor rights. The government decree, a derivative of the country’s 2017 law on migrant worker protection, is applicable to foreign commercial and fishing vessels, including distant-water boats.

A key change introduced in the new regulation includes having the Ministry of Manpower as the official authority to produce the permit for recruitment agencies to assign candidate migrant workers. Previously, the Ministry of Transportation could also issue a similar permit. Many observers have called out the overlapping authorities for undermining legal protections for the migrant deckhands.

Read the full story at Mongabay

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

 

Report: Illegal Fishing Should be Major National Security Issue

November 17, 2017 — Illegal and unregulated fishing supports transnational crime, piracy, insurgency and terrorism and should be treated as a national security issue, a new report from the National Geographic Society and the Center for Strategic and International Studies says.

Although illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing provide pathways for a host of criminal activities, “it doesn’t have the consciousness of government imagination” not only in the United States but globally, John Hamre, CSIS chief executive officer said on Wednesday.

Active enforcement of exclusive economic zones and protected maritime areas is “largely the Wild West” in legal terms because one nation’s laws differ from another, said Gregory Poling, one of the report’s authors. Nations have not agreed-upon definitions of what is permitted even in protected maritime areas.

Transnational criminal networks become involved through the use of large fishing vessels staying at sea for a year or more, said Daniel Myers, of the National Geographic Pristine Seas project. In reality, “You have slave labor” working on these ships. Often a two-step “trans-shipping” system is used. In the first step, the smaller boats unload illegal catches onto a large mother ship. The mother ship, in turn, refuels and resupplies the smaller fishing vessels, allowing them to remain out from port for months and keep the crews working, often against their will.

Additionally, “you have illegal fishing boats used as cover for narco-trafficking,” Myers said. The stomachs of illegally-captured sharks or other fish are filled with cocaine. The results are profits from the illegal catch and the drug smuggling.

Read the full story at USNI News

Labor issues improving with increased scrutiny, according to Thai industry rep

October 16, 2017 — Thai seafood producers claim they’re working to meet stricter reporting requirements, which they say are helping to improve labor and food safety problems in the industry.

There has been a rise in reporting requirements due to the U.S. Congress’ Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015, according to Panisuan Jamnamwej, chairman of the Committee on Fisheries and Related Industries at the Thai Chamber of Commerce. In addition, the introduction of QR code technology is increasing traceability and curbing abuses in Thailand’s seafood sector, according to Panisuan. Shrimp farmers are being encouraged to adapt the QR codes by being supplied with mobile data connections, he said, and wild-catch fishers are getting better at tracking their takes.

“Importers say you need to provide information such as the details of vessels and catches. Similarly on feed, if your fishmeal was caught at sea, you need the name of the ship, even if only one percent of the material came from that vessel,” Panisuan said.

In the past two years, Thailand’s fishing sector has faced sharp international criticism for its use of indentured Burmese laborers on some of its vessels, as documented by several NGOs. Thai industries have also run into trouble for their import of workers from neighboring Myanmar – the process itself is legal, but private recruiters have at times run afoul of the law. Burmese laborers made up the bulk of staff at several processing plants visited by SeafoodSource in Thailand recently.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

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

New AP story finds labor issues persist in Thai seafood industry

September 29, 2016 — A new Associated Press story explores progress made in the past year in reforming abusive labor practices in the shrimp processing sector in Thailand.

The article, “Promises unmet as Thailand tries to reform shrimp industry,” published 22 September, investigates the the difficulties faced by the industry in attempting to implement reforms. The article follows up on a March 2015 AP investigation titled “Seafood from Slaves,” which detailed the use of human trafficking, forced labor and violence against workers in the Thai seafood industry.

“The Associated Press…found that while some Thai companies that export shrimp to the U.S. have given formerly entrapped workers better jobs in-house, others still use middlemen who employ laborers in remote, guarded warehouses,” the AP reported in its new article. “That’s despite industry vows to end outside shrimp processing by the end of last year after human trafficking was exposed in the sheds.”

The owners of these sheds still disregard environmental, labor or safety laws, with 75 percent of the 109 sheds inspected so far this year receiving citations for violations and 24 were ordered to close, the AP reported.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Beyond Brothels: Farms And Fisheries Are Frontier Of Human Trafficking

July 28, 2015 — When the U.S. State Department released its annual human trafficking report on Monday, it told distressingly familiar tales of forced sex work and housekeepers kept against their will. But this year, one area got special attention: Slavery in the global supply chains of agriculture, fishing and aquaculture.

The report has ranked the anti-trafficking efforts of most nations around the world since 2001, sorting them into three tiers of compliance with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. To obtain the top ranking of tier one, countries must “demonstrate appreciable progress in combating trafficking,” while third-tier countries are deemed to be ignoring the problem, and thus subject to non-trade related sanctions.

In the report’s early years, domestic and sex work dominated, and trafficking was attributed to “greed and moral turpitude.” But in the 2015 report, the more mundane — but endemic — problem of labor rights within global supply chains takes center stage, with food industries highlighted for both abuse and for some promising efforts to fight the problem.

“Awareness about forced labor and its significance in the global economy has been mounting in recent years,” Mai Shiozaki, a spokesperson for the State Department, tells The Salt in an email. A mix of government officials, advocates, businesses and media had driven that shift, she says.

Read the full story at NPR