April 2, 2021 — Taiwan’s fisheries regulator has answered NGO claims of forced labor in its fishing fleet through a statement issued to SeafoodSource.
Noting the attention NGOs have brought to the abuse of foreign workers aboard Taiwanese fishing vessels, the Taiwan Fisheries Agency said in its statement it has “endeavored to improve the protection of the rights and benefits of the crew members through institutional guarantees.”
February 26, 2021 — After being at sea for two long years, 37-year-old Indonesian fisherman Darmaji finally stepped off the Taiwanese tuna fishing vessel he had been working on and back onto firm ground in May of 2020. Verbally abused daily, Darmaji’s largely Indonesian crew of 22 often worked 18-hour days—even when seven-meter waves flooded the boat interior—and were typically allowed to sleep for only three hours. Meals consisted of gummy rice, boiled chicken or fish, and, at times, even bait fish. The crew had to pay for any other food they consumed and drank largely distilled saltwater.
As if the daily indignities weren’t enough, Darmaji didn’t receive the full pay he was promised in his contract, and even had to pay a $1,200 security deposit before receiving his monthly salary. “It’s a prison at sea,” Darmaji said.
Lured by the promise of high wages offered by recruitment agencies, Darmaji is one of an estimated 23,500 Indonesians working on foreign boats. Globally, capture fishing employs 27 million people, primarily from developing countries. Indonesia is one of the biggest sources of cheap migrant labor for fishing fleets from China, South Korea, and Taiwan.
Darmaji experienced verbal abuse, debt manipulation, underpayment, and atrocious living conditions, but he is one of the luckier ones—thousands of other forced laborers also endure physical abuse at sea. Beatings for insubordination are not uncommon, said Max Schmid, deputy director at the Environmental Justice Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to raise public awareness of environmental and human rights abuses. One worker described getting locked in a freezer, and later electrocuted with a tool used to kill tuna, he notes. Schmid and colleagues have interviewed hundreds of Indonesian fishermen about working conditions on distant water fishing vessels mainly flagged to Taiwan, China or South Korea; over 20 percent of them described physical violence.
January 4, 2021 — U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has issued a withhold release order against a Taiwanese tuna trawler, saying it has received credible information that the vessel was involved in the use of forced labor.
The agency, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, on 31 December ordered its personnel at all U.S. ports of entry to detain tuna and other seafood harvested by the Lien Yi Hsing No. 12, a Taiwanese-flagged and -owned distant-water fishing vessel. The agency said its investigation concluded the Lie Yi Hsing 12’s operators had used deceptive hiring practices, withholding of wages, and debt bondage in staffing the vessel. In a press release, the CBP said it will provide the owner of the vessels the opportunity to demonstrate its merchandise was not produced with forced labor, or to export any of their shipments that have been detained to a third country.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.