A law that Thailand’s House of Representatives approved in late 2024 aiming to roll back reforms the nation had made to its fisheries industry has stalled in parliament after facing steady backlash.
In 2015, Thailand issued a new Fisheries Act that contained stringent regulations seeking to address alleged illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing and labor violations in the country’s fishing industry.
The reforms responded to the U.S. Department of State downgrading Thailand to Tier 3 in its annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report – its lowest possible rating – in 2014 and the European Commission (E.C.) imposing a yellow card on Thailand in 2015.
Thanks to the measures Thailand put in place, in 2016, the U.S. Department of State upgraded Thailand to a Tier 2 watchlist rating in its TIP report and the E.C. removed its yellow card in January 2019.
Though the reforms helped the Thai fisheries sector improve its international status, the commercial fishing sector in Thailand criticized the adverse impacts they claimed the reforms had on their operations and profitability. Some within the industry rigorously lobbied political parties to roll back the reforms, according to the Bangkok Post.
Those requests soon gained backing from several Thai political parties.
The now-defunct Move Forward Party (MFP), the predecessor of the People's Party (PP), introduced the fishermen-requested amendments in the last term of parliament, which ran from 2019 until March 2023. Their efforts were not successful at the time.
In the lead-up to Thailand’s May 2023 election, however, several major political parties once again pledged to reverse the reforms and resubmitted the fisher-backed proposals.
In December 2024, Thailand’s House of Representatives approved the bill with no opposing votes and sent it to the country’s Senate.
That approval caused NGOs and other groups in the country to sound the alarm over the effects the rollbacks might elicit.
The Federation of Thai Fisherfolk Association (FTFA) organized a protest on 13 January of this year during the first reading of the bill by the Senate.
According to FTFA President Piya Tetyam, the proposed rollbacks could cause annual damage of over THB 200 billion (USD 5.93 billion, EUR 5.65 billion), mainly due to the potential depletion of juvenile fish.
The federation demanded that stakeholders up and down the fisheries value chain take part in reviewing the bill, and similar demands were presented in an open letter dated 13 January that was signed by 57 organizations, including the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), Greenpeace, and other fishermen associations.
Following these protests, the Thai Senate voted 128-8 to reject Section 28 of the bill, which would have reauthorized fishing with lights and fine-mesh nets. It, however, did vote 141-4 to pass the remaining 70 sections and sent the amended bill back to the House for reconsideration, the Bangkok Post reported 28 February.
On 19 March, Thailand’s House of Representatives rejected the Senate’s draft law by a vote of 398-3 and decided to establish a joint committee to further consider the bill.
“This decision to convene a joint committee provides us more breathing space to work on the remaining gaps in the Fisheries Act draft, namely the continued absence of strong labor protections for seafood processing workers and a lack of sufficient penalties for committing IUU fishing,” EJF Regional Director for Southeast Asia Dominic Thomson told SeafoodSource. “Without effective deterrents in the form of financial penalties or punitive measures, this new Fisheries Act won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.”
The joint committee will work and submit a new version of the bill that both houses of parliament will review again.
NGOs have warned that rolling back the reforms could reintroduce yellow cards, poor TIP rankings, and other deterrents to accessing major export destinations that together make up around 60 percent of Thailand’s seafood trade.
These markets include the U.S., Japan, the E.U., Australia, Canada, South Korea, and New Zealand, which have either already implemented or are in the process of applying stricter transparency standards.
EJF said in a November 2024 policy briefing that the reversals could also enable other countries in Southeast Asia to gain a competitive edge against Thailand in global seafood export rankings.
“Thailand still has a credible opportunity to demonstrate its leadership in achieving a profitable, sustainable, and ethical fishing industry; this is achieved through a substantive participatory approach,” Thomson said.
