Netflix’s new documentary Seaspiracy contains far too much horrifying information about what humans are doing to destroy marine life — and in turn, ourselves — to break down in one article. But one of the most appalling things the documentary describes is the continued use of slave labor in the commercial fishing industry.
“Slavery at sea is a massive problem,” Steve Trent of the Environmental Justice Foundation says in Seaspiracy. “I think it’s very hard to give precise figures, precisely because it operates under the radar. Those people who are driving these abuses for obvious reasons don’t want to get found out. In that regard, I would point to Thailand.”
The documentary is far from the first examination of slave labor in commercial fishing: The Associated Press won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2016 for an investigation in which AP journalists discovered men trapped in cages and followed refrigerated trucks to expose abuses in Southeast Asia.
The AP said its investigation “led to the release of more than 2,000 slaves and traced the seafood they caught to supermarkets and pet food providers across the U.S.”
In 2016, President Obama enforced a ban on U.S. imports of slave-produced goods.
But according to Seaspiracy, the problem of forced labor on fishing boats persists in foreign waters. Trenet explains that there are approximately 51,000 boats fishing in Thai waters under the country’s flag and that efforts to fish more cheaply have contributed to the use of forced labor.
The film’s director, Ali Tabrizi, went undercover to an international seafood expo as a fake seafood businessman in order to question a Thai seafood representative. The representative, whose face was blurred out in the documentary, denied that any slavery was going on in the Thai seafood industry.
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Next, Tabrizi flew to Bangkok to visit a halfway home where he interviewed men who said they had escaped slavery on fishing boats. Their identities were concealed for their protection.
“I was at sea for 10 years, two months and two days,” one of the men says in the documentary. “I was scared, let me be straight with you. Nobody could get off the ship. There were guards that kept eyes on us.”
Another man said he’d been enslaved for six years, and that he had tried to take his own life three times over the course of the ordeal.
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