SALON

Monday, May 21, 2012 2:26 PM UTC

Did slaves catch your seafood?

Thailand, a major source of fish imported to the US, depends on forced labor for its product

By

Topics: GlobalPost, Thailand, Food, ,

Did slaves catch your seafood? (Credit: Alena Brozova via Shutterstock)
This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.

PREY VENG, Cambodia, and SAMUT SAKHON, Thailand — In the sun-baked flatlands of Cambodia, where dust stings the eyes and chokes the pores, there is a tiny clapboard house on cement stilts. It is home to three generations of runaway slaves.

Global PostThe man of the house, Sokha, recently returned after nearly two years in captivity. His home is just as he left it: barren with a few dirty pillows passing for furniture. Slivers of daylight glow through cracks in the walls. The family’s most valuable possession, a sow, waddles and snorts beneath the elevated floorboards.

Before his December escape, Sokha (a pseudonym) was the property of a deep-sea trawler captain. The 39-year-old Cambodian, his teenage son and two young nephews were purchased for roughly $650, he said, each through brokers promising under-the-table jobs in a fish cannery.

There was no cannery. They were instead smuggled to a pier in neighboring Thailand, where they were shoved aboard a wooden vessel that motored into a lawless sea. His uncle had fallen for the same scam five years prior and escaped to warn the others. But Sokha told his son, then just 16, that this venture would turn out differently. He was wrong.

“We worked constantly, for no pay, through seasickness and vomiting, sometimes for two or three days straight,” he said. “We obeyed the captain’s every word.”

Near-daily death threats reinforced the captain’s supremacy. So did his Vietnam War-era K-54 pistol, and the night he carved up another slave’s face in view of the crew. “For 20 hours a day, we were forced to catch and sort sea creatures: mackerel, crabs, squid.” It’s back-breaking work, under the searing tropical sun. “But the fish wasn’t for us,” he added.

So who was it all for?

The answer should unsettle anyone who closely examines Thailand’s multi-billion dollar wild-caught seafood industry and the darkest links in its supply chain.

“It’s an export-oriented market. And we know the countries where these products are exported to,” said Lisa Rende Taylor, chief technical specialist with the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking or UNIAP. “Do the math.”

For Americans, the calculation is worrisome. Thailand is the United States’ second-largest supplier of foreign seafood. Of America’s total seafood imports, one out of every six pounds comes from the Southeast Asian nation.

In 2011 alone, Thailand exported 827 million pounds of seafood worth more than $2.5 billion to the US, according to National Marine Fisheries Service figures. The only nation that consumes more Thai seafood exports is Japan.

Murder is an occupational hazard. But a monotonous job assembling iPads is heaven compared to slavery on a Thai trawler, where conditions are as grueling and violent as any 19th-century American plantation. The lucky escape within a year or so. Less fortunate are those traded several times over for years on end.

Denying that the fruits of forced labor reach the biggest importers of Thai seafood — Japan, America, China and the European Union — has become increasingly implausible.

The accounts of ex-slaves, Thai fishing syndicates, officials, exporters and anti-trafficking case workers, gathered by GlobalPost in a three-month investigation, illuminate an opaque offshore supply chain enmeshed in slavery.

A long trail of offshore operators — slave boats, motherships and independent fishmongers — can obfuscate the origins of slave-caught seafood before it ever reaches the shore. While the industry’s biggest earners rely on clannish and violence-prone fishing crews for raw material, they’re distanced from the worst abuses by hundreds of nautical miles and several degrees of middlemen.

The result is that many Thai factory bosses have no idea who caught the seafood they process for foreign consumers.

There are caveats. The majority of Thailand’s two largest seafood exports to the US — tuna and shrimp — are sourced differently. Most “Thai” tuna is actually imported from overseas and processed for re-export. The shrimp industry, though routinely accused of abusing poor migrants, is at least vulnerable to spot checks on seaside farms.

The same cannot be said for deep-sea trawlers, the favored vessel of slave-driving captains.

The species caught by Thai trawlers legal and illicit alike include sardines, mackerel, cuttlefish, squid, anchovies and “trash fish,” tiny or foul-tasting catch ground into animal food or preserved to create fish sauce. Americans consume these breeds en masse. One in five pounds of America’s imported mackerel or sardines comes from Thailand, according to US government records. For processed fish balls, puddings or cakes — made from trawlers’ trash fish — the figure is one in three pounds. Thai fish sauce supplies nearly 80 percent of the American market.

All that trawler catch ends up in familiar American fare: anchovy pizzas, squid linguine, smoked mackerel salads and fish fillets on ice. Even pets are entangled: trash fish is a common dog- and cat-food ingredient. But industry representatives in Thailand admit there’s often no way to tell whether a particular package of deep-sea fish was caught using forced labor.

Using bar codes, American shoppers can track packaged Thai-exported seafood to its onshore processing facility, said Arthon Piboonthanapatana, secretary general of the Thai Frozen Foods Association. “You can trace it back to the factories.”

But exporters, he said, are not in the business of policing the fishing syndicates that supply their factories. “We only have the power to enforce our members,” Arthon said. “We have no power to enforce other stakeholders such as boats or fishermen.”

American seafood importers consider themselves similarly powerless in overseeing far-flung Thai boats. “Western regulatory agencies have little or no reach, or authority, over various parts of the value chain,” said Gavin Gibbons, spokesman for the National Fisheries Institute, America’s chief seafood trade organization and lobbying group based outside Washington, DC. The institute will promptly respond to allegations against specific factories, he said. But so far, it has not found an effective way to monitor conditions on deep-sea boats catching US-bound fish.

“We have started discussions with our members about just how far an audit could realistically go and whether, perhaps, there are dockside audits that could be developed,” Gibbons said.

The “nature of boats being at sea,” he said, presents a major challenge to industry’s self-policing efforts.

International pressure to rid Thailand’s seafood trade of slavery is mounting. Thailand teeters just above the US State Department’s worst human-trafficking ranking and could be downgraded this summer. Last year, during a visit that vexed Bangkok officials, a UN rapporteur declared that forced labor is “notoriously common” in Thailand’s fishing sector and even alleged police complicity.

“It’s not like monitoring brothels, plantations or factories … all this labor is at sea,” Rende Taylor said. “So it’s essentially a universe where captains are king. Some are out to make as much money as possible by working these guys around the clock and being as cruel as they want to be.”

More GlobalPost

More Patrick Winn.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • This photo. President Barack Obama has a laugh during the unveiling of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Tx., Thursday. Former first lady Barbara Bush, who candidly admitted this week we've had enough Bushes in the White House, is unamused.
    Reuters/Jason Reed

  • Rescue workers converge Wednesday in Savar, Bangladesh, where the collapse of a garment building killed more than 300. Factory owners had ignored police orders to vacate the work site the day before.
    AP/A.M. Ahad

  • Police gather Wednesday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to honor campus officer Sean Collier, who was allegedly killed in a shootout with the Boston Marathon bombing suspects last week.
    AP/Elise Amendola

  • Police tape closes the site of a car bomb that targeted the French embassy in Libya Tuesday. The explosion wounded two French guards and caused extensive damage to Tripoli's upscale al-Andalus neighborhood.
    AP/Abdul Majeed Forjani

  • Protestors rage outside the residence of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Sunday following the rape of a 5-year-old girl in New Delhi. The girl was allegedly kidnapped and tortured before being abandoned in a locked room for two days.
    AP/Manish Swarup

  • Clarksville, Mo., residents sit in a life boat Monday after a Mississippi River flooding, the 13th worst on record.
    AP/Jeff Roberson

  • Workers pause Wednesday for a memorial service at the site of the West, Tx., fertilizer plant explosion, which killed 14 people and left a crater more than 90 feet wide.
    AP/The San Antonio Express-News, Tom Reel

  • Aerial footage of the devastation following a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in China's Sichuan province last Saturday. At least 180 people were killed and as many as 11,000 injured in the quake.
    AP/Liu Yinghua

  • On Wednesday, Hazmat-suited federal authorities search a martial arts studio in Tupelo, Miss., once operated by Everett Dutschke, the newest lead in the increasingly twisty ricin case. Last week, President Barack Obama, Sen. Roger Wicker, R.-Miss., and a Mississippi judge were each sent letters laced with the deadly poison.
    AP/Rogelio V. Solis

  • The lighting of Freedom Hall at the George W. Bush Presidential Center Thursday is celebrated with (what else but) red, white and blue fireworks.
    AP/David J. Phillip

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 5 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

Salon is proud to feature content from GlobalPost, an awarding-winning international news site that focuses on original reporting from journalists stationed around the world. GlobalPost combines traditional journalistic values with the power of new media to offer a fresh perspective on global developments.

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
“This could be a career ender for Michele Bachmann”
188 points189 points | 88 comments
vote
Are millennials delusional? New research suggests that members of "Generation Me" are warped by a profound sense of entitlement
32 points33 points | 30 comments
vote
"Contrary to the myth of the happy, apple-cheeked great-great-grandmother, cooking has rarely been seen as a source of fulfillment, historically speaking." DIY domesticity, femivores, and refutations on the impacts of feminism on fast-food culture.
34 points35 points | 21 comments
vote
6 insidious ways you’re getting ripped off … And how to fight back
27 points28 points | 4 comments
vote
Peace Corps Volunteer’s Hellish Abortion Story - When Christine Carcano was raped in Peru, she felt the Peace Corps had her back.
25 points26 points | comment

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: "The Shelter Cycle": Raised in a cult

Recommendations