Thailand supplies a large portion of America’s seafood. But Thailand’s giant fishing fleet is chronically short of up to 60,000 fishermen per year, leaving captains scrambling to find crew. Human traffickers have stepped in, selling captives from Cambodia and Myanmar to the captains for a few hundred dollars each. Once at sea, the men often go months, or even years, without setting foot on land.
Cambodian Vannak Prum’s destiny changed in a dirt-road town called Malai. It’s a Cambodian outpost on the border with Thailand that is known for its involvement in the trafficking of human beings.
Prum arrived in Malai seven years ago searching for work. His wife was pregnant, and he needed money for the hospital bill. He intended to work for two months, but ended up meeting a human trafficker.
A few days later, Prum was sold onto a Thai fishing boat the length of a basketball court, where he worked in tight conditions with 10 men. He says he didn’t reach land again for three years.
“I didn’t get paid,” he says. “I remained in the middle of the sea and worked day and night.”
As Thailand grows more prosperous, its citizens are shunning fishing work in which, even in the best cases, men are away for months chasing dwindling fish stocks.
Injuries and fatalities are common, and seasickness at least in the beginning is constant. Wicharn Sirichai-Ekawat owns a small fleet of fishing boats and consults with the National Fisheries Association of Thailand.
“There are about 150,000 men working on the boats, and about 40 percent of them are using foreign labor,” he says. “We depend on them.”
Some of these men are recruited legally, but others, like Prum, are sold into bondage. They report 20-hour days under mind-numbing conditions: minimal fresh food or water, no medicine apart from aspirin, cramped bunks, unsafe conditions and the relentless smell of fish.
“Sometimes the winch cable would accidentally cut off,” Prum says. “If any of us stayed in front of it, the cable would injure or even kill us.”
Ship bosses pose their own hazards. “One man’s head was cut off and thrown in the water,” Prum says. “I saw it.”
The United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking interviewed fishermen on Thai boats who are from Myanmar, also known as Burma; 59 percent said they witnessed a murder by their captain.
The fishermen also said that captains often give workers drugs mainly amphetamines so they will keep working through the night.
The fishing boats are able to stay at sea for extended periods thanks to a network of shuttle boats, or motherships, that come and pick up the fish that’s been caught and deliver fuel, food, ice and other supplies that fishing boats need to keep going.
Ultimately, Thai fish products show up on American shelves in a variety of ways, from fish sticks to pet food.
The Thai boats catch an estimated 1 in 5 pounds of American mackerel and sardines, and a good portion of anchovies on American pizzas. Thailand’s two biggest seafood exports farmed shrimp and tuna are not implicated in these particular abuses, but have labor and environmental concerns of their own.
2012 NPR