There is a certain romanticism about fishing, an ancient practice that brings to mind the Biblical Saint Peter, famously a fisherman, or perhaps the titular protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” Behind every fish, crustacean and other form of seafood we eat is a story, or how that food landed on our plates.
In an ideal world, the process would be simple and direct. A lone fisher or group of happy fishers would go to the ocean, a river or lake, then haul in endless bounties of aquatic creatures. The workers would be treated with respect, the environment would be respected and the seafood would be carefully handled.
But in reality, there are multiple steps between when seafood is caught and sold, during which workers can be exploited, pollution can be dumped in the environment and fish depleted, mislabeled or otherwise mishandled.
Perhaps most strangely of all, the people who speak out against these things often wind up mysteriously dead.
There was Emmanuel Essien, a 28-year-old fisheries observer who mysteriously disappeared in July 2019 while aboard the Chinese-owned vessel Meng Xin 15. Although the police said there were no signs of violence or any other crime, Essien’s family insists his disappearance was linked to his reports of illegal fishing on a trawler, including environmentally unsustainable practices.
That wasn’t all; the Environmental Justice Foundation, which investigated Essien’s apparent death, reported at the time that roughly 90% of Ghana’s industrial trawlers are owned by Chinese companies that regularly abuse their workers by beating them, forcing them to work in unsafe conditions and paying substandard wages.
Next Eritara Aati Kaierua, a fisheries observer in Kiribati, died under mysterious circumstances in March 2020 on a Taiwanese vessel in the Pacific Ocean, with Human Rights at Sea investigating the matter and finding the state’s official story to be highly flawed. Then in October 2023 another Ghanaian fisheries observer went missing, this time 38-year-old named Samuel Abayateye. He had been assigned to a South Korean vessel; his decapitated body washed ashore the coast of Ghana six weeks later.
Instead of being limited to Ghana, the problem of fisheries observers facing physical danger is global in nature. While outright murder is relatively rare, violence is pervasive. A survey of fisheries observers in the United States found that roughly half had been harassed on the job, and the Association of Professional Observations (APO) routinely logs stories of people being threatened at knifepoint, locked in their rooms, raped, starved, forced to accept bribes or otherwise physically harmed while performing their professional duties.
But these people being threatened are simply trying to ensure that seafood is safer for everyone. The fisheries observers exist to make sure companies do not worsen the dire problem of plastic pollution, which could overwhelm and eradicate much of ocean life by 2050. Plastic pollution is linked to various forms of cancer, as well as infertility, and studies show our seafood is full of plastic products.
Fisheries observers also prevent catches from being mislabeled, a common practice known as fish fraud. In 2016 the non-profit group Oceana released a report which revealed that one out of five of the more than 25,000 samples of seafood that they tested from 55 countries were mislabeled.
Worldwide Asian catfish, hake and escolar were the fish most likely victims. Nearly 60 percent of the time, the replacement fish were from species that could get certain consumers sick.
In other words, the problems of the abused fishers and fishery observers very quickly become the problems of seafood consumers.