SEAFOOD’S INCONVENIENT TRUTH
The fish you are eating tonight may have been caught by boats using slave labour
BENJINA, INDONESIA The Burmese slaves sat on the floor and stared through the rusty bars of their locked cage, hidden on a tiny tropical island thousands of kilometres from home.
Just a few metres away, other workers loaded cargo ships with slave-caught seafood that has clouded the supply networks of major supermarkets, restaurants and even pet stores in North America.
But the eight imprisoned men were considered flight risks — labourers who might dare run away.
“All I did was tell my captain I couldn’t take it anymore, that I wanted to go home,” said Kyaw Naing. “The next time we docked,” he said nervously out of earshot of a nearby guard, “I was locked up.”
Here, in the Indonesian island village of Benjina and the surrounding waters, hundreds of trapped men represent one of the most desperate links criss-crossing between companies and countries in the seafood industry. This intricate web of connections obscures a brutal truth: your seafood may come from slaves.
Tainted fish can wind up in the supply chains of some of the United States’ major grocery stores; the nation’s largest retailer, Walmart; and the biggest food distributor, Sysco. It can find its way into the supply chains of some of the most popular brands of canned pet food. It can turn up as calamari at fine dining restaurants, as imitation crab in a California sushi roll or as packages of frozen snapper relabelled with store brands.
In a yearlong investigation, the AP talked to more than 40 current and former slaves in Benjina. It documented the journey of a single large shipment of slave-caught seafood from the Indonesian village, tracking it by satellite to a gritty Thai harbour. Upon its arrival, journalists followed trucks that loaded and drove the seafood over four nights to dozens of factories, cold storage plants and the country’s biggest fish market.
The tainted seafood mixes in with other fish at a number of sites in Thailand, making it nearly impossible to tell where a specific fish caught by a slave ends up. However, entire supply chains are muddied, and money is trickling down the line to companies that benefit from slave labour.
The slaves said the captains on their fishing boats forced them to drink unclean water and work 20to 22-hour shifts with no days off. Almost all said they were kicked, whipped with toxic stingray tails or otherwise beaten if they complained or tried to rest. They were paid little or nothing, as they hauled in heavy nets.
Some shouted for help over the deck of their trawler in the port to reporters.
“I want to go home. We all do,” one man called out in Burmese, a cry repeated by others.
“If Americans and Europeans are eating this fish, they should remember us,” said Hlaing Min, 30, a runaway slave from Benjina. “There must be a mountain of bones under the sea. ... The bones of the people could be an island, it’s that many.”
For Burmese slaves, Benjina is the end of the world.
Roughly 3,500 people live in the town that straddles two small islands separated by a five-minute boat ride. Part of the Maluku chain, formerly known as the Spice Islands, the area is about 645 kilometres north of Australia.
The small harbour is occupied by Pusaka Benjina Resources, whose five-storey office compound stands out and includes the cage with the slaves. The company is the only fishing operation on Benjina officially registered in Indonesia, and is listed as the owner of more than 90 trawlers. However, the captains are Thai. Pusaka Benjina did not respond to phone calls and a letter, and did not speak to a reporter who waited for two hours in the company’s Jakarta office.
On the dock in Benjina, former slaves unload boats for food and pocket money. Many are men who were abandoned by their captains — sometimes five, 10 or even 20 years ago — and remain stranded.
In the deeply forested island interiors, new runaways forage for food and collect rainwater, living in constant fear of being found by hired slave catchers.
And just off a beach, a graveyard swallowed by the jungle entombs dozens of fishermen. They are buried under fake Thai names given to them when they were tricked or sold on to their ships, forever covering up evidence of their captors’ abuse, their friends say.
“I always thought if there was an entrance there had to be an exit,” said Tun Lin Maung, a slave abandoned on Benjina, as other men nodded or looked at the ground. “Now I know that’s not true.”
The story of slavery in the Thai seafood industry started decades ago with the same push-and-pull that shapes economic immigration worldwide — the hope of escaping grinding poverty to find a better life somewhere else.
In recent years, as the export business has expanded, it has become more difficult to convince young Burmese or Cambodian migrants and impoverished Thais — all of whom were found on Benjina — to accept the dangerous jobs. Agents have become more desperate and ruthless, recruiting children and the disabled, lying about wages and even drugging and kidnapping migrants, according to a former broker who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The broker said agents then sell the slaves, usually to Thai captains of fishing boats or the companies that own them. Each slave typically costs around $1,000 US, according to Patima Tungpuchayakul, manager of the Thai-based non-profit Labour Rights Promotion Network Foundation. The men are later told they have to work off the “debt” with wages that don’t come for months or years, or at all.
“The employers are probably more worried about the fish than the workers’ lives,” she said.
The slaves said the level of abuse on the fishing boats depends on individual captains and assistants. Aung Naing Win, who left a wife and two children behind in Myanmar two years ago, said some fishermen were so depressed they threw themselves into the water. Win, 40, said his most painful task was working without proper clothing in the ship’s giant freezer.
“It was so cold, our hands were burning,” he said. “No one really cared if anyone died.”
The shipment the AP tracked from the port of Benjina carried fish from smaller trawlers; journalists talked to slaves on more than a dozen of them.
A crane hoisted the seafood on to a refrigerated cargo ship called the Silver Sea Line. At this point, by United Nations and U.S. standards, every fish in that hold is considered associated with slavery.
The AP followed the Silver Sea Line by satellite over 15 days to Samut Sakhon. When it arrived, workers on the dock packed the seafood over four nights onto more than 150 trucks, which then delivered their loads around the city.
One truck bore the name and
bird logo of Kingfisher Holdings Ltd., which supplies frozen and canned seafood around the world. Another truck went to Mahachai Marine Foods Co., a cold storage business that also supplies to Kingfisher and other exporters, according to Kawin Ngernanek, whose family runs it.
When asked about abusive labour practices, Kingfisher did not answer repeated requests.
Every month, Kingfisher and its subsidiary, KF Foods Ltd., sends about 100 tonnes of seafood from Thailand to America, according to U.S. Customs Bills of Lading. These shipments have gone to Santa Monica Seafood, Stavis Seafoods
— located on Boston’s historic Fish Pier — and other distributors.
A similar pattern repeats itself with other shipments and other companies, as the supply chain splinters off in many directions in Samut Sakhon. It is in this Thai port that slave-caught seafood starts to lose its history.
The seafood the slaves on Benjina catch may travel around the world, but their own lives often end right here, in the crude cemetery in this island village.
In the past, former slave Hla Phyo said, supervisors on ships simply tossed bodies into the sea to be devoured by sharks. But after authorities and companies started
demanding that every man be accounted for on the roster upon return, captains began stowing corpses alongside the fish in ship freezers until they arrived back in Benjina, the slaves said.
It has been five years since he himself escaped the sea and struggled to survive on the island. Every night, his mind drifts back to his mother in Myanmar. He knows she must be getting old now, and he desperately wants to return to her.
“I’m starting to feel like I will be in Indonesia forever,” he said, wiping a tear away. “I remember thinking when I was digging, the only thing that awaits us here is death.”