The very architecture of Thailand’s seafood sector — a deep reliance on undocumented migrant laborers — has not only led to high-profile human rights abuses exposed in the media but also the overexploitation and depletion of Thailand’s marine resources, according to a presenter at the SeaWeb Seafood Summit on Tuesday.
Steve Trent, executive director of the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), peppered a rather sobering discussion on labor abuses with pointed remarks on the disturbing levels of violations in Thailand that his organization has documented. Debt bondage, violence, intimidation and murder were all common occurrences on fishing vessels, instances made public by a Guardian article published in June 2014.
In a powerful EJF-produced video that kicked off the presentation, a slave laborer on a Thai fishing vessel said that a broker on a fishing vessel told him that the price to kill him was 37 cents — the price of a bullet. Of the some 200,000 workers on Thai fishing vessels, about 90 percent of them are trafficked into the country from Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, among other places, according to EJF. Many of them are subjected to torture, both physical and psychological, confined to their floating working areas for up to two years at a time.
“Those individuals are taken to extreme levels of abuse. I have never witnessed what we have seen in Thailand. It’s not just organizations like EJF, which cynics expect to say this from. A [United Nations] survey found that 59 percent of [Thai fishing industry workers] interviewed had witnessed a murder taken place on a boat,” Trent said during the plenary session titled Preventing Human Rights Abuses in Seafood Supply Chains. “It’s hard work, it’s nasty, it’s dangerous and difficult. The thais don’t want to do it.”
The problem is not isolated to Thailand, Trent said, adding that forced and bonded labor has been noted on Scottish fishing vessels, in fisheries deemed responsible and sustainable. “It is everywhere,” he said. “And it’s at sea, and we just don’t know [the magnitude of the issue].”
A number of panelists spoke on the complexity of the issue and the difficulties in correcting the violations throughout the supply chain. Chris Ratto, director of sustainability for U.S. retailers Safeway and Albertsons, said that creating a supply chain free of human trafficking, human rights abuses and child labor requires education of suppliers and employees in contact with those suppliers. “This topic is greater than any one organization, NGO or the government,” he said. “It requires collaboration and we want to be a part of that.”
Maya Spaull, director of new category innovation for Fair Trade USA, shared possibly the only good news to come out of the discussion. Safeway will be the first retailer to carry a Fair Trade yellowfin tuna product from Indonesia, in March.
Ratto conceded, however, that consumers may not be willing to pay a price premium for products that can verify the absence of labor abuses in their supply chains. “At the end of the day, when a consumer is opening up an ad and sees shrimp for USD 2 less [elsewhere], they may not be thinking about sustainability,” he said.
Can the seafood industry effectively look within and solve the problems of human rights abuses? As National Fisheries Institute John Connelly noted toward the end of the session, there is very little any industry can do to respond to highly publicized reports that refuse to name names.
“Without specifics, we’re chasing ghosts,” he said. “Give us the level of specificity we need, that’s how we can best work together.”
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