World - How a Tiny Team of Journalists Held the World’s Biggest Fishing Fleet to Account
ABOARD THE OCEAN WARRIOR on the South Atlantic – On the high seas roughly a thousand miles north of the Falkland Islands, an 18-year-old deckhand working on a Chinese squid ship nervously ducked into a dark hallway to whisper his plea for help. “Our passports were taken,” he said to me. “They won’t give them back.”
Instead of speaking more, he then began typing on his cell phone, for fear of being overheard. “Can you take us to the embassy in Argentina?” Just then, my minder rounded the corner and the deckhand abruptly walked away. Minutes later, I was ushered off the ship.
After I returned to shore, I contacted his family. “My heart really aches,” his older sister, a math teacher in Fujian, China, said, after hearing of her brother’s plea for help. Her family had begged him not to go to sea, but he was drawn to the idea of seeing other countries. She hadn’t known that he was being held captive, and she felt helpless to stop it. “He’s really too young,” she said. “And now there is nothing we can do, because he’s so far away.”
This was one of many stark encounters during a four-year investigation I conducted with an international team of reporters at sea and on land that revealed a broad pattern of severe human rights abuses tied to the global seafood industry. We focused on China because it has by far the largest high-seas fishing fleet and processes much of the world’s catch.
The investigation documented cases of debt bondage, wage withholding, excessive working hours, beatings of deckhands, passport confiscation, the denial of timely access to medical care, and deaths from violence on hundreds of Chinese fishing ships. Data from just one port—Montevideo, Uruguay—showed that for much of the past decade, one dead body has been disembarked there per month, mostly from Chinese fishing ships. The State Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration both named China among countries most likely to engage in illegal labor practices in the seafood sector. The U.S. nonetheless imports much of its seafood from China. Half of the fish sticks served in U.S. public schools, for example, have been processed in China, according to a study by the Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers. The organization explained that state and large school districts have historically used USDA grants to purchase seafood directly from commercial vendors, many of which source from China.
This Chinese fleet is also categorized by The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime as the largest purveyor of illegal fishing in the world. Our reporting revealed Chinese vessels illegally entering the waters of other countries, disabling locational transponders in violation of Chinese law, breaking U.N. sanctions that prohibit foreigners fishing in North Korean waters, transmitting dual identities (or “spoofing”), finning of protected shark species, fishing without a license, and using prohibited gear. More than one hundred Chinese squid ships were found to have engaged in illegal fishing practices, including the dumping of excess catch back into the sea.
