The New Seafood Slavery Risk Tool: Shining a Light on a Dark Practice

seafoodwatch:

By Geoff Drake

Imagine you’re a young father, from Myanmar, who has come to
Thailand with this simple goal: to find work as a fisherman and support your family. But once aboard, your time at sea stretches to weeks, months, or
even a year. You find yourself working 20 hours a day, at one of the world’s
most dangerous occupations, wearing just flip flops. You sleep in unsanitary
quarters, and are subject to violence and intimidation.

But the biggest surprise occurs when the boat finally docks:
you are kept in locked quarters, and not allowed to come ashore. And where
would you go, anyway? After all, the captain has locked away your passport, and
kept much of your wages.

This existence of seafood slavery is real, and occurring in
many parts of the globe. But what may be even more shocking is that the
byproduct of this underworld economy—shrimp, crab, snapper, and other common
seafoods—can make its way to our markets and eventually, our tables…right here
in the United States.

The Monterey Bay
Aquarium Seafood Watch program wants to help businesses keep slavery out of their seafood sourcing. On February 1,
2018, in coordination with Liberty Asia and the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership,
it will release an online tool enabling restaurants and suppliers to identify the
risk of forced labor, human trafficking or hazardous child labor in the fishery operations that supply their seafood. 

A Groundbreaking Exposé

Human rights abuses in fishing have been around as long as fishing
itself—perhaps for thousands of years—but came into striking focus in 2015,
when the Associated
Press did a groundbreaking series of articles that graphically and
painfully chronicled the problem, even using satellite tracking to follow the
tortuous path of tainted seafood from boat, to supplier, to stores across the
world. One troubling takeaway: The seafood
you buy at your local grocery store, or even your local restaurant, may have
been caught by slaves.

“When these articles came out, our business partners said,
‘We look to you as experts in sustainability— where do we begin?’ ” says Dr. Sara
McDonald, Seafood Watch senior fisheries scientist. “So we partnered with other organizations who had received similar
requests and started working on a tool to assess egregious human trafficking,
forced labor, and hazardous child labor.”

Birgitte Krogh-Poulsen, a specialist on forced labor and child labor who has worked for the International Labour
Organization, saw the effects of human rights abuses in Thailand, where families from Myanmar live in “absolute squalor,” awaiting
the return of husbands and fathers at sea. 

“But it’s not just a Southeast
Asia problem,” Sara notes. “There have been recent articles about slavery
in the U.K. scallop industry, and the Hawaii longline fishery. The
fishing industry employs a lot of migrant workers everywhere.”

Stolen at Sea

How can
such cruel practices occur in society today? The answer almost always involves
one thing: money. “Myanmar is one of the poorest countries in the world,” Sara says.
“Relative to that, Thailand looks wealthy.” Some workers are desperate enough to take jobs that are characterized
as the “four Ds”: dirty, dangerous, demeaning, and difficult. 

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