Technology helps tackle overfishing and labor abuse

BANGKOK — Fishing boats used high-tech systems to find vast schools of fish for decades, depleting stocks of some species and leading to the complete collapse of others. Now more than a dozen apps, devices and monitoring systems aimed at tracking unscrupulous vessels and the seafood they catch are being rolled out — high-tech solutions some say could help prevent labor abuse at sea.

Illegal fishing, which includes catching undersized fish, exceeding quotas and casting nets in protected areas, leads to an estimated $23 billion in annual losses, according to the United Nations. Meanwhile, overfishing close to shore has pushed boats farther out, where there are few laws and even less enforcement to protect workers from abuse. Slavery has been documented in the fishing sectors of more than 50 countries, according to U.S. State Department reports.

Earlier this year, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said using technology at sea could eventually mean “there is not one square mile of ocean where we cannot prosecute and hold people accountable”

However, Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, cautions that catching human traffickers goes beyond finding boats.

“Technology is all about knowing where the fishing boats are on the ocean, but that does precious little for crews being physically abused and worked to the bone on those vessels,” he said.

Here are some emerging tech solutions: Thomas Kraft at Norpac Fisheries Export established one of the industry’s first bar-code systems that give each fish a tag that can provide details about location, boat, species, and weight. He’s been using the technology in locations worldwide and says it could easily be expanded to include crews on individual boats to help fight against labor abuse. with detailed evidence about where a boat is and what it appears to be doing. Eyes on the Seas can spot boats even if they turn off their basic safety satellite trackers, which may be a deterrent for would-be bad actors, but confidential data used in the system means it cannot be publicly available. Built by the Pew Charitable Trusts and a U.K. government satellite start-up initiative, the system is still being fine-tuned. Rolled out earlier this year, Global Fishing Watch is on the web and open to the public in beta form, with tracks for 35,000 fishing boats going back more than four years. Oceana, SkyTruth and Google partnered on the site, with support from the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation.