Can customers force change

When you go shopping for tuna there’s an astonishing lack of answers to questions about where it comes from. Most retailers simply don’t know, or if they do, they won’t say.

If you wanted an example of the power you have as a consumer to force change, it’d be hard to go past eggs.

Retailers in New Zealand are transitioning to sell only barn or free-range eggs, saying the new policy was driven by ‘‘consumer pressure’’.

The change is being phased in and it’ll be years before it’s complete, but it’s a compelling illustration of how customers can exert their influence on major companies to do the right thing.

Why’d we force that change? Because we’d seen the videos filmed by animal rights activists, of emaciated, battery hens crammed into cages in disgusting conditions, without enough to eat, forced to keep producing until they’re surplus to requirements.

So it’ll be interesting to see what the consumer response will be to similar video and photographic evidence of human beings, emaciated, being kept in disgusting conditions, not having enough to eat, being sleepdeprived, and beaten.

This time, not in the name of eggs, but in the name of tuna.

The men who crew foreign boats are from faraway countries fishing on the high seas, a long way from New Zealand. (Actually, frequently they fish pretty close to New Zealand.) Video evidence of the type animal activists manage to film by entering poultry farms in the dead of night is hard to come by: these fishing vessels are in the distantwater, often for months – sometimes even years – at a time.

But there is such video.

Greenpeace obtained it and shared it with Stuff Circuit. They were investigating cases of modernday slavery on tuna-fishing boats.

The video in question is of a man named Supriyanto. He’s Indonesian, a solo father of three children; a fisherman on a tuna longliner that set sail from Taiwan for the Pacific in 2015.

There are actually three short videos, the first of which shows Supriyanto displaying his misshapen head to the camera, pointing out his injuries including a bloodied nose and fat lips.

By the third video, apparently filmed within about a month of the first, Supriyanto has become unrecognisable: skeletal, unable to talk, his cheekbones protruding, his eyes the watery consistency of imminent death.

And we learn this was indeed filmed only a day or two before Supriyanto died – apparently, the autopsy found, from blood poisoning. But clearly there’s far more at play than that.

The video is graphic and disturbing and hard to watch. Like the video of those hens.

All in the name of tuna.

The fish caught by migrant crew like Supriyanto ends up on plates somewhere, obviously, but here?

Well, that’s the thing. It’s much harder to find out than it should be.

And as you’ll see in the Stuff Circuit investigation, Caught, when you go shopping for tuna there’s an astonishing lack of answers to questions about where it comes from.

Most retailers simply don’t know, or if they do, they won’t say.

Is that good enough?

If we demanded change to save hens, what will we do for people?