Human rights in the fishing industry: what are the pressing risks?

Over 60 million people make a living catching, farming and processing seafood. What are the predominant challenges they face?

IHRB’s Francesca Fairbairn explores human rights abuses in the global seafood industry with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ian Urbina, who has just released the second series of The Outlaw Ocean Podcast.   

Over four years carrying out extensive field work, Ian’s investigations document state-sponsored forced labour on board Chinese fishing vessels and in fish processing factories in China, and report on a whistle-blower’s exposure of human rights violations in a shrimp processing factory in India.  

Francesca and Ian discuss the responsibilities of companies with fish or seafood in their supply chains, and the desperate need for stronger regulations to protect seafood workers across the world. 

Ian set up The Outlaw Ocean Project in 2019, a non-profit journalism organisation that produces investigative stories about human rights, labour, and environmental concerns on the world’s oceans.

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Producer & Editor: Helen Brown
Additional Contributors: Sam Simmons, IHRB's Head of Communications

Transcript

Ian Urbina:

I do think there's probably going to need to be a reckoning. I think the pressure probably is going to have to end up on governments and companies to say, "Okay, we can't operate in these settings unless we have real rigour in the reassurance we have that rules are being followed and we're going to set those rules, not the local country where they're eager to get our business."

Debra Sago:

Hi there and welcome to Voices from the Institute for Human Rights and Business, also known as IHRB. I am Debra Sago and in this podcast you'll hear from people working to make respects for human rights, part of their everyday business.

You've just heard from Ian Urbina. Ian is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who's been reporting on environmental and human rights violation at sea for many years. Ian's been looking into stories of illegal fishing for the latest series of the Outlaw Ocean Podcast.

My colleague, Francesca Fairbairn, runs the shipping programme here at IHRB. She's been finding out more about this. So Francesca, why did you want to speak to Ian?

Francesca Fairbairn:

I wanted to speak to Ian because although fishing isn't the primary focus of our shipping programme, there are widespread, egregious and widely reported human rights violations that happen on fishing vessels and also in fish processing, seafood processing factories on land.

The reason this is important from a business and human rights perspective is that these forced labour fish, for want of a better term, are very likely to pass through the hands of big corporate operations, probably brands and end up in supermarkets that we all know and hear of.

And therefore the implications for business are significant and the importance for business on doing human rights due diligence if they have fish or seafood products within their supply chain.

Ian Urbina:

We thought of the oceans looked at them through a wide angle lens and thought, okay, what players are the biggest out there and the most opaque? And China jumped out. China has the largest distant water fishing fleet by a factor of five. The next biggest fleet is minuscule in comparison. Thousands of ships.

And then also processing capacity that the factories on land are major players. So even fish being caught by French ships or Canadian ships or US ships often is shipped to China to be processed before it's sent back to consumers in the West.

So, we want to look at human rights concerns on the ships themselves in the Chinese fleet, and that's part one. And then the other two parts are a close look at state sponsored forced labour in the factories on land.

One category, state sponsored forced labour being weaker. So, workers from Xinjiang that are being moved across the country to work in seafood plants that ultimately get shipped to Europe and US and Canada.

And then the second category of state sponsored forced labour that we looked at were North Korean workers in a different part of China that are also shipped by their government into China to work in factories under pretty awful conditions.

Francesca Fairbairn:

Have I got it right, that Uyghurs from the Chinese Xinjiang region, they are also used on board vessels?

Ian Urbina:

So EJF, Environmental Justice Foundation recently released a report. What they documented were the presence of North Koreans on vessels. And that was a first. Very strong but very small data set showing North Korean workers on some small numbers on Chinese fishing vessels.

Francesca Fairbairn:

And I think you said that you've identified Uyghur forced labour tied to seafood imported to more than 20 countries, including the US and Canada.

If we look at the US and at the legislation they have, they've got the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act, which should be preventing forced labour fish, for want of a better term, for entering into the US.

There's a similar one, cat surfer Korean workers, how effective they are is hard to tell and any way they don't cover workers from democratic countries who find themselves in forced labour conditions.

But we'll come back to the issue of corporate due diligence in a minute. But first, can you tell us about the second investigation that was carried out with the help of a whistleblower, I think, regarding the shrimp factory in India?

Ian Urbina:

Yeah, I mean, India obviously is a major global player when it comes to the export of shrimp. A third of all shrimp consumed in the US comes from India.

Ironically, India emerged as the superpower of shrimp on the heels of disclosures about human rights concerns in Thailand. And a lot of the Western industry moved out of Thailand to try to avoid further bad press on those issues ended up in India. Now we're seeing many of the same problems.

We were contacted by a man named Josh Farinella, who is a longtime seafood industry person. He came to know us because we were investigating another company and we were squeezing them pretty intensely and had a bunch of meetings with them disclosing our findings and Josh was working for that company at the time.

In any case, Josh contacted us and said he had gotten this job in a factory in a sea shrimp processing plant, very large in India. American company, and he was shocked to find the extent of forced labour, debt bondage, pretty dismal living conditions and a lot of outright fraud by the company.

Both towards labour auditors, things like hiding workers and shuttling them off site when the auditors would show up so that the company wouldn't get in trouble for living conditions that were not sufficient for that number of workers. And also fraud related to the use of antibiotics and food safety concerns in the shrimp itself.

So, this was an amazing trove of documents, tens of thousands of pages of documents, video recorded calls, audio that really provided unusual level of clarity on what fraud and abuse looks like in this industry.

Francesca Fairbairn:

Yeah, and in fact, I think if you go to the website, you can see some of those excerpts from those videos from WhatsApp chats and pictures of the accommodation and some of the hygiene problems at that plant. And you can see also the ginormous size of the plant itself with an aerial shot.

So, if we think about both of those investigations in the round i.e., seafood that ends up on our plate, could you talk a little bit about this idea of, or tactic of, as you call it, plausible deniability that's used by some companies, shall we say, to evade or outsource responsibility in which you say is sort of built into the system?

Ian Urbina:

Yeah, I mean, the system here is globalised product of any sort, not just seafood. So I think, the attraction and benefit, if you will, of globalising a product, which is to say allow capital, money, investment to move and set up shop wherever it's cheapest for that to occur and also to put industries in countries where the work can get done fastest and cheapest.

Okay. So that's the globalised nature of the world we live in. Seafood is just one product within that system. I think the upshot is things get to us fast and cheap. Us being consumers, wherever we are, that's the beauty of globalisation.

The downside of globalisation is the supply chain itself becomes much longer so there are a lot more handoffs of the product between when it's made and when it's consumed or used.

And in getting longer it gets more opaque because the end beneficiaries, the companies that are selling these products, in this case seafood companies, don't know really a lot about what's happening at the front end of the chain.

And this is where plausible deniability comes in. They say sometimes that they can't know because it's spot market and things move around and they can't actually do proper inspections in these countries, whether it's China or elsewhere, et cetera, et cetera. Or it's out on a ship and we can't possibly know.

So, the conditions of the workers upstream on the chain are typically not truly known by the downstream players of a globalised supply chain. And that I think is a benefit.

The plausible deniability is that it's a benefit to the end sellers of the product that they can throw up their hands and say, "Hey, look, we don't really know what's happening in those places because we can't." And if you want things that cheap and that fast, we have to work in those settings. And in those settings it's pretty darn hard or impossible."

I think a lot of that's bunk. I'll just say it quite straight. If they wanted to clean up and know what was going on in their chain, it would raise the price, slow things down, but they could.

Francesca Fairbairn:

Yes. And I think the other thing to bear in mind about dividing the supply chain up into one, two, three, four, five, six tiers, more tiers than two, is that every level of that tier wants to make a profit.

So therefore, the person at the top is even more squeezed in terms of what they're receiving than they would've been if there was just two levels of the supply chain if they were just buying fish directly from the bows, I imagine.

Ian Urbina:

Yeah, I quite agree. I think there's just also a comfort level on the end of the chain where consumers have long come to assume that the thing that they're buying is probably made somewhere far away and has been handed off many times.

And I think that's fine, but I do think there's probably going to need to be a reckoning. And I personally don't think putting the burden on the consumer because we're all too busy and can't possibly investigate every product we buy.

I think the pressure probably is going to have to end up on governments and industries companies to say, "Okay, we can't operate in these settings unless we have real rigour in the reassurance we have that rules are being followed and we're going to set those rules, not the local country where they're eager to get our business."

Francesca Fairbairn:

Yeah, I mean, I guess the other thing just before I go on is if it's something's really cheap, somebody's not being paid enough. I think the point you make is absolutely right.

And I've obviously mentioned some of the legislation that the US has brought in, whether that's going to be implemented on an ongoing basis given the current administration, I don't know. Although I do know that in July last year, they did designate seafood as a high priority area under the Uyghur Slavery Prevention Act. So I don't know what impact that has had.

In the meantime, I guess, looking at companies, obviously at IHRB, we recommend that all companies carry out human rights due diligence, right the way up their supply chains.

And that's in line with the guiding principles on business and human rights, in line with modern slavery legislation and all the various due diligence acts that are here or in the pipeline, the Norwegian Transparency Act or the EU regulations such as they are or will be.

But I wonder if you know of any companies who are doing good things to ensure they don't buy such fish or fish caught on such vessels and or processed in such factories, or indeed, have any been in touch with you since the start of your project? They may not have, but I'm just curious.

Ian Urbina:

So, during the four-year investigation on China, we made a point of aggressive transparency, which is to say everyone we name anywhere in this project, we will reach out to them, we'll lay out our findings.

We will not go off record with anyone because that's a disservice in our view to the public. And it also allows players to spin you as a reporter. So, everything will be in writing, everything will be on record, and whatever they send back, we will publish in full on our website.

And then that allows folks to avoid the notion that maybe we're cherry picking quotes or not giving them the company sufficient time at the mic, if you will. We have this huge database online called the discussion tab, and you can see every single exchange we had with hundreds upon hundreds of companies.

Most companies just stonewalled us and wouldn't engage. Some companies engaged robustly and said, "Look, could you lay out your methodology and your findings and give us some time to look into it on our own?"

Oftentimes, not always, that was a stalling tactic. And the notion of they're looking into it on their own was sort of buying time for how they were going to do PR control.

But sometimes they would look into it. In a place like China looking into it on their own, what does that really mean? So you're going to go, are you sending a foreigner to the Chinese factory to knock on the door and to see if there are North Koreans there?

Do you think they're still going to be there now that we've reached out to the entire industry and everyone knows that we've got visual evidence of their being there. They're not dumb, they're going to move them off site the minute they got that email.

But nonetheless, many companies did engage and look into it, and in some cases they severed ties with plants where we showed them the evidence. And we tried to also rely on visual evidence. So actual footage from inside the plants, the documents, the presence of North Koreans or Uyghurs there as opposed to he said, she said type evidence.

So it was harder for these companies to say, "No, that's not true." "Well, okay, you can say that, but we have actual footage of a Uyghur filming themselves in your factory," so that's going to be hard to deny.

So, there were repercussions. The CEO resigned. There was legislation, there were hearings in EU, Canada and US Congress, several companies, about half a dozen broke ties with certain plants where we had documented evidence of the presence of state sponsored forced labour, so things did come from it ultimately.

Francesca Fairbairn:

And I wonder if you came across, I'm thinking about organisations that are effective at helping companies. The one that springs to mind for me, although in theory it was I think initially a consumer related organisation is the Marine Stewardship Council.

The idea that if you are in the supermarket and you buy something with an MSC stamp, then one would hope or infer at least that wasn't forced labour fish.

Ian Urbina:

Yeah, I mean, Marine Stewardship Council is really flawed. These certification bodies are actually dead centre the focus of our investigations because they provide the perception that they are identifying companies that are doing a better job.

And we looked more intensely at those companies because they're the ones that had Aquaculture Stewardship Council, Best Aquaculture Practises, Marine Stewardship Council, so these are the certification bodies that are laying claim to high-road actors. And truth be told, they're hugely flawed in many ways.

One is they claim to be providing a level of verification that a certain supply chain is abiding by certain rules, either environmental rules and or labour rules, but they're not actually able to check every step in the chain.

There complete blind spots in the chain that MSC or these certification bodies don't get to. They never go on ships, for example. And we're documenting all these rights abuses on vessels, but MSC never actually sends any auditors out.

They can't show up at Chinese factories unannounced. That's forbidden in China. So, when they go to factories or in India shrimp, when they go, they announce that they're coming. Well, how is that a spot check? If you know someone's coming to check your house in a week, you're going to clean it up. And that's exactly what happens.

So these programmes and Marine Stewardship and MarinTrust at the forefront of them are really, really problematic in some ways. In my view, the evidence seems to indicate they do more harm than good because they give a false reassurance to consumers that is untrue.

Francesca Fairbairn:

Well, and it's such a shame because the initial Genesis of them or reason behind them was for that not to happen, for that exactly not to happen. And yet, so the system has evolved that allows it to have many, many corners to hide these human rights violations.

Many, many corners, human rights and environmental violations of course, because let's not forget, these Chinese trawlers are causing enormous amounts of environmental damage as well with various illegal activities in relation to bottom trawling and so on.

I guess then to conclude on that, we just have to keep talking about it so that governments enter the conversation together with companies and as is IHRB's mission to bring businesses and governments together to tackle and address these human rights violations. Would that be right? Would that sit within this confine?

Ian Urbina:

Yeah, that's right. No, I think you're quite right. I think that where one goes from here, especially for IHRB, is to continue pushing governments and companies to really think hard about how to raise the bar on due diligence, quite especially and legally required due diligence as opposed to it being optional.

And also more obligatory rules, probably government and legislated as opposed to industry formed. The industry creation of certification bodies was a self policing so that they wouldn't have the other type of cops involved, and I think that's probably not going to work.

So, I think, governments requiring due diligence is probably where it's going to go, and companies that are willing to encourage that will move the industry.

Francesca Fairbairn:

And let's hope that the EU, Germany and others don't roll back on their promises for regulation on human rights due diligence up supply chains for companies within the EU at least. Thank you very much, Ian.

I wonder if you can briefly tell us just a little bit about Max Hardberger, the seagoing James Bond character that you encountered and that you talk about in episode four.

Ian Urbina:

So, one of the episodes in season two of the podcast is focused on Repo Man of the Sea. And this is the strange small international industry of mostly guys who steal ships on behalf of banks and mortgage lenders.

The grandfather of that industry is a guy, American, from Alabama named Max Hardberger. And I began following him a bunch of years ago and went out on a bunch of repos, a couple of repos, one in Haiti, one in Greece with him to see how that work transpires.

It's really interesting just in that this is white-collar piracy, if you will. Port in corrupt countries often will feign some violation and hold a ship in a stranglehold where it's losing huge amounts of money every day by not being allowed to leave the port, but the government won't allow them to clear the fine.

They're intentionally bleeding that ship so that it ends up having to go bankrupt and then they can take over it and resell it. And this is a big problem in shipping and fishing, but mostly shipping.

And so when that problem happens to ship owners and they think it's a corrupt situation, then they often call the likes of Max Hardberger who flies in and sneaks on the ship. And takes it out to the high seas and takes it to a different jurisdiction where at least the mortgage lender and the ship owner think they'll get a fair shake.

Francesca Fairbairn:

It's a fascinating story. I was in a meeting the other day where somebody described banks as innocent lenders. I understand in this context that's them trying to protect their assets. But I don't think there's a thing called an innocent lender because I think you'd agree that Max Hardberger's techniques are, well, they are legal.

Ian Urbina:

It depends whose law. So that's what's interesting, right? They're legal vis-a-vis US law. They're probably breaking Greek or Haitian law.

But if you look at those laws and the application them in that specific port, it's a legitimate question to say, "Is that a just law or is that a just application of law, or is this a corrupt situation where we're getting scammed?" So it's really in the grey area, I would say.

Debra Sago:

Thanks Francesca and Ian for that fascinating insight into what's happening at sea. And thank you for listening to this episode of Voices, which is brought to you from the Institute for Human Rights and Business.

Until next time, be sure to share and follow this podcast. That way you will never miss an episode. And if you'd like to find out more about the work that we do at IHRB, then head to ihrb.org.