It’s a Lot More than Fishy

Chinese fishing fleet off Australian coast

With so much misery and pain floating around the world, it’s easy to overlook what might seem a minor problem… but it’s not. It entails forced labor, horrific living conditions, overfishing and serious and often illegal depletion of natural resources. That which should be abundant is slowly dissipating, leaving misery and environmental damage in its wake. Even as many larger, developed countries are experiencing population contractions, many less developed countries face the double-whammy of growing populations looking at over-harvesting/overfishing combined with serious reductions available agricultural resources due to escalating climate change variables combined with pollution.

As if that were not enough, you can add the use of forced labor (a polite intonation for “slavery”) to extract minerals and harvest crops and seafood as part of the nasty equation. On November 13th, writing for the Los Angeles Times, Andrew Sharpless, chief executive of Oceana, an international organization focused on ocean conservation, drilled down on seafood including where and how we get it, noting that the US imports 80% of what we consume: “Do you like cod, shrimp, salmon, crab or pollock (also known as fish sticks)? Of course you do. Do you shop at Walmart, Costco, Kroger or Albertsons for fish? Who doesn’t? Do you eat at one of the more than 400,000 restaurants supplied by food distributor Sysco? Almost certainly.

“If so, you’ve likely been served or sold seafood caught by Indonesian forced-labor victims on Chinese vessels or processed in China by Uyghurs, a cultural, racial and religious minority that faces systematic repression. Some 79% of the seafood sold in the United States is imported, according to the latest data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. China alone supplies nearly 10% of American seafood imports.

“Chinese-owned and -flagged ships are the largest distant-water fishing fleet in the world. This fleet includes an estimated 6,500 ships, and they fish in every ocean. To put this fleet in context, neither Japan nor the U.S. has more than 1,000 such ships… Some of these distant-water vessels remain at sea for as long as two years, transferring their catches to other ships to be brought to port. The living and working conditions for the workers trapped on board are often dreadful, with inadequate medical treatment, poor nutrition and relentless, dangerous work day and night.

“A well-managed and abundant ocean could feed a billion people a healthful seafood meal every day, forever. Overfishing, especially by big industrial fleets, is destroying that abundance — collapsing a wild food resource essential to the health and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people along coastlines around the world.

“A four-year investigation of industrial distant-water fishing by the Outlaw Ocean Project, published this week in the Los Angeles Times, uncovered evidence of human rights abuses and violent and deadly conditions. These conditions, tolerated in an industry that gets food to American tables, demands immediate action… There are several policy changes that would alter the practices of the world’s fishing fleets and affect the abundance of our oceans.” His recommendations include pressuring the WTO to stop allowing nations to subsidize fleets that traditionally overfish, while the US should require enforceable proof that imported seafood was not harvested with forced labor, with full disclosure of the ships/fleet/sea of origin.

Sharpless is all for complete labeling so consumers know what they are buying, and he adds: “In the meantime, American consumers will have to be more selective about the seafood they purchase. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch guide can help steer buyers to environmentally sustainable options, such as those that are well managed and caught or farmed responsibly. The best choices tend to be locally caught or farmed U.S. fish and shellfish.” Americans shop in clinically clean supermarkets or eat at restaurants where all they see is the finished product. But that cavalier “look the other way” attitude is the most certain route to even more rapidly escalating food prices and an increasingly uncomfortable and toxic planet.

I’m Peter Dekom, and a more viable, livable planet literally begins with, even depends on, the individual choices that consumers and businesses make every day.