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

New ways to fight human-rights abuses in the global seafood industry

April 14, 2016 — When Bayani secured an overseas job in the fishing industry from a broker in his home country of the Philippines, it was about finding work that he was skilled at and enjoyed and that could support his family. He didn’t expect to be forced to fish illegally, to be imprisoned on a fishing boat, or to have his passport and other documents withheld by his employer. Even so, had his family back home been receiving his salary, as he thought was happening, he said he might have kept quiet. But when Bayani learned a third-party was skimming his pay for an alleged debt owed by his employer, he decided to break his silence regardless of the consequences.

Bayani’s ordeal lasted for months during which he feared for his own wellbeing and that of his family. But because he had access to a mobile phone and a former employer who had leverage with his current employer, he eventually escaped his ordeal. Many other fishers in the global fishing industry aren’t so lucky. Bayani was not kidnapped and enslaved. He did not witness murder, child labor, or sexual abuse — all well documented occurrences in seafood supply chains.

Human-rights abuses in the seafood industry have grabbed headlines, causing governments, NGOs, businesses, and individual consumers to consider a more holistic view of sustainability — one that incorporates social as well as environmental responsibility. Recently, new approaches to improving the industry’s human-rights record have emerged. These often involve adding a social dimension to sustainable-seafood certification schemes or improving oversight via technological fixes. However, experts have yet to agree on which approaches are likely to work or which to embrace, given how bad the situation is.

See the full story at Mongabay