Saving Seafood

US ramping up pressure on China’s use of forced labor in distant-water fishing

November 19, 2020 — Fishery products from China and Taiwan have been added to a list of commodities associated with forced labor in the latest edition of a US government report on child and forced labour globally.

The 2020 edition of the List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor – a report required by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005 – claims that the majority of workers on Chinese distant-water fishing vessels are migrants from Indonesia and the Philippines.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Working group of nations go after China’s flags of convenience

October 22, 2020 — Fisheries officials from the European Union, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United States have met to discuss cooperation on limiting the use of flags of convenience by distant-water fishery companies involved in illegal fishing.

The online meeting, which took place 15 October, follows a report by the advocacy group Environmental Justice Foundation criticizing the process whereby fishing companies buy flags from flag states, which are then unwilling or unable to monitor the activity of problem trawlers. The report, “Off the Hook: How Flags of Convenience Let Illegal Fishing Go Unpunished,” details the damage that flags of convenience cause to fisheries and how they are used to conduct illegal fishing. In the report, EJF calls for sanctions to end the practice and more transparency surrounding the registration of fishing vessels.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

US includes Taiwan on forced labor list due to fishing industry abuses

October 1, 2020 — The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has released its 2020 “List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor,” and has included Taiwan for the first time for its issues related to forced labor in the fishing industry.

The inclusion comes after 19 NGOs and businesses urged the DOL to include the nation on its list after discoveries of forced labor on fishing vessels in Southeast Asia. A damning Greenpeace report accused 13 foreign distant-water fishing vessels of using forced labor.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

FCF-linked vessels outed by US government as likely using forced labor

August 18, 2020 — The U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Trade has placed a Withhold Release Order (WRO) on all seafood harvested by the Taiwanese-owned, Vanuatu-flagged fishing vessel Da Wang “due to reasonable suspicion of forced labor on the vessel.”

The WRO will require detention of seafood harvested by the Da Wang at all U.S. ports of entry. Importers of any detained shipments “will have an opportunity to export their shipments or submit proof to CBP that the merchandise was not produced with forced labor,” according to a CBP press release.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Drug trafficking could be putting ‘fragile fisheries’ at risk, study says

July 6, 2020 — The fishing boat flew a Singaporean flag as it sailed toward Batam Island in Indonesia. But when Indonesian Navy officers intercepted the vessel and boarded it in February 2018, they discovered that the boat, and its four-person crew, were actually from Taiwan. Flying a false flag wasn’t the only offense — customs officials also found 41 rice sacks packed with a ton of methamphetamine, or crystal meth, hidden beneath food supplies in the vessel’s hold.

The use of fishing vessels to transport drugs is a fairly common occurrence, according to a new study published in Fish and Fisheries. In fact, the study found that drug trafficking on fishing vessels has actually tripled over the last eight years, accounting for about 15% of the global retail value of illicit drugs.

Dyhia Belhabib, the paper’s lead author as well as the principal fisheries investigator at Ecotrust Canada and founder of Spyglass, an online tool that maps out vessels involved in maritime crimes, said there’s actually a distinct lack of data on drug trafficking in the fisheries sector. This study aimed to bridge that gap.

To investigate the relationship between the drug trade and global fisheries, Belhabib and her co-researchers gathered all of the available data on 292 reported global cases between 2010 and 2017, and used estimation techniques to fill in any missing information. For instance, when they had the amount of drugs, but not the price, they calculated prices based on data on the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) database.

Read the full story at Mongabay

Disappearances, danger and death: what is happening to fishery observers?

May 22, 2020 — Liz Mitchell was on her laptop in her living room in Eugene, Oregon, when she got the news. Thousands of miles away, on a Taiwanese fishing boat, a fishery observer named Eritara Aati Kaierua had been found dead.

Details were scant. The ship’s name (Win Far No 636), the dead man’s passport number, and where the boat was now headed: the port of Kiribati, a central Pacific island nation on the equator.

But for Mitchell, president of the Association of Professional Observers (APO), it was sadly nothing new – another death, devoid of facts.

“We’ve recorded one or two deaths of fishery observers every year since 2015,” says Mitchell. “All with the same outcome: no information.”

Read the full story at The Guardian

Evidence persists of IUU, forced labor in Taiwanese fleet, including on FCF-linked vessels

April 3, 2020 — Greenpeace East Asia is accusing Bumble Bee’s parent company, Taiwan-based Fong Chun Formosa (FCF), of forced labor and environmentally harmful practices aboard at least two vessels linked to the company.

FCF is among the top three tuna traders in the world, and acquired Bumble Bee in January after the American seafood company filed for bankruptcy. The two companies have a long history: Prior to the acquisition, FCF had been supplying Bumble Bee with 95 percent of its albacore and more than 70 percent of its light meat tuna, according to Greenpeace’s examination of court filings.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Evidence persists of IUU, forced labor in Taiwanese fleet, including on FCF-linked vessels

March 30, 2020 — Greenpeace East Asia is accusing Bumble Bee’s parent company, Taiwan-based Fong Chun Formosa (FCF), of forced labor and environmentally harmful practices aboard at least two vessels linked to the company.

FCF is among the top three tuna traders in the world, and acquired Bumble Bee in January after the American seafood company filed for bankruptcy. The two companies have a long history: Prior to the acquisition, FCF had been supplying Bumble Bee with 95 percent of its albacore and more than 70 percent of its light meat tuna, according to Greenpeace’s examination of court filings.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Women’s History Month: Talking with Jui-Han Chang

March 26, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Can you tell us about your science journey, your career in science?

My journey to science was not the shortest, but it was the luckiest. I grew up in Taiwan, a small but beautiful island country about 100 miles off the coast of southeastern China. It’s surrounded by spectacular oceans and full of rugged mountains. My dad is an amateur ecologist and my mom is an environmental advocate. It seemed all the cards were lined up for a career in the natural sciences, but nothing particularly inspired me until later.

When I was young, I was lost. I struggled in schools because I couldn’t find anything interesting enough to make me want to study hard, but I went to college anyway. I was a business major at Aletheia University in Taiwan. It was not my choice, but was the only option based on my scores on the test Taiwanese students take to get selected for colleges and majors. During college I went scuba diving, which was part of a swimming coach training. It was love at first sight, my first glimpse into the mystery of the ocean. At the time, I didn’t know what I was looking at, but I knew I loved this different but beautiful world. That’s when I knew I should change my career path.

After barely finishing with a business degree, I decided to go to graduate school. I wasn’t sure if this was the right thing to do because of my poor grades, but it was the best decision I ever made. I applied to the National Taiwan Ocean University’s Institute of Marine Resource Management and was accepted. I lucked out because they were looking for students with a multidisciplinary background.

Read the full release here