全球智库信息集成服务系统

The United States imported more than $34 billion in seafood products in 2015, most of which was supplied by a handful of major seafood exporters: China, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Canada, and Ecuador.¹ Most of these exporting nations lack the management standards that have made the United States an international leader in sustainable fisheries management.² As fish populations become depleted in their nearshore waters, fishermen are forced to travel farther distances for their catch. These extended trips increase industry costs, such as fuel and labor, and incentivize illegal operations as a way to make a profit. Moreover, the global growth in demand for seafood now outpaces population growth. Skyrocketing market demand puts both marine ecosystems and seafood industry workers under pressure, and the resulting environmental and human rights abuses, therefore, must be addressed in tandem.³

Until recently, there was little mainstream interest in the manner in which imported seafood is caught and transported to the United States. Unlike the garment sector, which for decades has been dogged by accusations of dangerous working conditions and abusive practices in its overseas supply chains, criticism of labor issues in the food industry has largely focused on the conditions of domestic workers in fields, on farms, and in processing plants. Over the last two years, however, a series of groundbreaking investigations by news organizations and advocacy groups exposed horrific treatment of laborers aboard commercial fishing vessels and at aquaculture sites and seafood processing plants in Southeast Asia.

These reports, which appeared in The New York Times, the Associated Press, and The Guardian, as well in publications by the Environmental Justice Foundation and other nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, provided accounts of migrants sold into slavery by unscrupulous labor brokers and human traffickers and forced to work in abysmal conditions without pay or under crushing debt loads. Many victims—some as young as 15 years old—described routine beatings and physical confinement with chains and manacles; others told stories of brutal maiming and even execution inflicted as punishment for attempted mutiny or escape.⁴

These deeply researched accounts generated international attention and earned their authors a range of accolades, including a Pulitzer Prize. They also elevated the issue of labor conditions in the seafood industry and prompted one major seafood importer—Nestlé—to commission an external inquiry into its own supply chains, which found significant labor abuses.⁵ Perhaps most significantly, reports of slavery at sea were a major factor behind the U.S. Congress’s decision earlier this year to close a legal loophole that had allowed companies to circumvent a ban on the import of goods whose production involved slave or convict labor.⁶

These developments and increased global awareness of human trafficking in the seafood industry have occurred at the same time that the U.S. government and the international community more broadly have been seeking to address the growing challenge of illegal seafood harvesting practices. The U.S. response to these practices, referred to as illegal, unreported, and unregulated, or IUU, fishing, spans a range of regulatory and foreign assistance initiatives, including the creation of a supply chain traceability mechanism and a trusted trader program designed to enhance enforcement of existing bans on illegally caught seafood.⁷ Some within the U.S. government, including Secretary of State John Kerry and Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Robert Portman (R-OH), have explicitly linked the fight against IUU fishing to efforts to eliminate labor abuses in seafood supply chains. ⁸ As Secretary Kerry stated earlier this year, the mistreatment of workers in the seafood industry “is as much a story about illegal fishing as it is about human slavery, because the illegal boats are most often where this awful treatment is occurring.”⁹

The rising interest in confronting illegal and inhumane practices in the seafood industry—especially through bipartisan congressional measures—provides cause for optimism that the United States and its international partners can cooperate on an effective framework to eliminate labor abuses from seafood supply chains. Measures that improve the sustainability of global fisheries through enhanced accountability and transparency—for example, by establishing a mechanism to trace seafood as it moves through complex and often confusing supply chains—can also strengthen efforts to identify and counter human trafficking at sea. Yet optimism by itself will not end seafood slavery. The complexity of the global trade in seafood products and the diversity of actors participating in the fishing sector mean that only a sustained, coordinated effort across major seafood importing and exporting nations and private industry is likely to produce a lasting solution.

This report examines how the federal government can coordinate more effectively across agencies and with the private sector to address seafood slavery. It finds that current approaches to dealing with the global challenge of human trafficking are ill-equipped to deter and punish the mistreatment of seafood laborers and that only a cross-cutting, interdisciplinary approach that situates seafood slavery in the wider context of lawlessness at sea is likely to make inroads against the problem. It also finds that key laws designed to fight human trafficking and IUU fishing are being enforced in an unnecessarily narrow and compartmentalized way. Ending human rights abuses in the seafood industry will require greater information exchange and cooperation across agencies—particularly between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and law enforcement and customs authorities—and partnerships between the U.S. government and the private sector and civil society that leverage technological innovation to strengthen the global response to seafood slavery.

Human trafficking is the use of force, fraud, or intimidation to compel individuals to engage in labor against their will. Human trafficking can take many forms, ranging from literal imprisonment using physical restraints and the threat of violence to subtler forms of psychological coercion, including the imposition of onerous debts that trap the debtor in perpetual servitude.¹⁰ Contrary to popular perception, trafficking victims do not always experience smuggling or transportation. Although human trafficking is most commonly associated with the sex trade, it can occur in any industry where deceitful actors stand to profit from low- or zero-wage labor. Trafficking victims come from many backgrounds, but marginalized populations susceptible to false promises of a better life—such as migrants and low-income workers—are especially vulnerable. The International Labor Organization estimates there are currently more than 20 million individuals being subjected to human trafficking and that forced labor generates $150 billion in illegal profits each year.¹¹

High demand for cheap seafood and poor regulation of fishing activities in domestic and international waters have produced ripe conditions for exploitation of workers. According to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, roughly one-third of the world’s fisheries are overfished, and 58 percent are fully exploited.¹² Overfishing has serious consequences for local communities and the sustainability of marine resources. As fish populations decline, food and job security are put at risk and the potential for ecosystem collapse increases. In addition, as the demand for seafood continues to increase and the abundance of legal fish diminishes, the incentive to fish illegally is rising. Pew Charitable Trusts estimates that more than 1,800 pounds of wild-caught fish are stolen from global seas every second.¹³ While there have been recent notable efforts to combat IUU fishing, including the ratification of the Port State Measures Agreement and the proposed seafood traceability rule, overfishing remains persistent.¹⁴

Significantly, there is evidence that the depletion of global fish stocks has correlated with the rise in seafood slavery. Unregulated and illegal fishing tends to deplete nearshore fisheries, causing fishing fleets to travel longer distances for their catch, which in turn results in higher fuel and labor costs. Even a small increase in the cost of labor can significantly increase the cost of production, leading some fishing companies to take drastic measures to stay competitive.¹⁵ Without enforcement and oversight, labor costs are the easiest to cut from the equation, creating an incentive for modern slavery. As fleets travel further from regulated waters, moreover, it becomes easier to engage in labor abuses without detection.

Human trafficking related to the seafood sector has been documented in countries and markets as diverse as New Zealand, Thailand, Ghana, Ireland, and—most recently—U.S.-registered fishing vessels docked in Hawaii.¹⁶ These abuses occur aboard vessels in both domestic and international waters, as well as on land at aquaculture sites and seafood processing plants. Furthermore, the complex and opaque nature of seafood supply chains has allowed products tainted by slave labor to reach U.S. consumers via popular retail outlets and brands such as Walmart, Costco, and Nestlé.¹⁷ Verité, an NGO that deals exclusively with labor violations in supply chains, has asserted that human trafficking exists in almost all seafood supply chains.¹⁸

Victims of seafood-related human trafficking are lured or forced into exploitative situations through deceit and violence. In many cases, recruiters entice vulnerable and impoverished unskilled laborers into crossing borders on the false promise of a well-compensated job outside the seafood industry. Instead of arriving at their expected workplace, however, laborers are forced onto boats where they work for little to no compensation for extended periods—sometimes as long as years. In other cases, trafficking victims voluntarily take up work aboard vessels or processing plants but find themselves saddled with excessive recruitment fees and other debt burdens that trick them into a state of perpetual servitude—a condition referred to as “debt peonage.”¹⁹

The diversity of participants in the seafood industry and the sophisticated logistics of transporting merchandise across international waters make monitoring for human trafficking especially challenging. For example, the common practice of transshipment—when smaller vessels unload their catch to larger motherships instead of returning to port and in exchange receive fuel and supplies—allows small boats to stay far out at sea and evade the scrutiny of domestic governments—particularly those with small or nonexistent coast guard resources—for far longer than if they regularly returned to port. Furthermore, transshipment means that fish harvested using trafficked labor are commonly commingled with responsibly caught fish prior to arriving at destination markets, posing challenges for public officials and private sector actors seeking to eliminate human trafficking in supply chains.²⁰

Although human trafficking in the seafood industry is a distinct challenge from IUU fishing, they share the same main drivers: weak rule of law, limited data on violators, poor coordination among international actors, and rising global demand for seafood products at an affordable price. Furthermore, the two problems are often self-reinforcing and frequently occur simultaneously.

While nearly all of these abuses occur in foreign countries, they remain relevant to U.S. consumers for reasons beyond the moral imperative to combat slavery. American seafood consumers or pet owners have likely eaten or fed their pets seafood provided by slaves. Unlike most other food that Americans eat—the vast quantity of seafood consumed in the United States comes from foreign sources. Of the fish and shellfish that Americans consume each year, only 3 percent is caught or farmed in American territory, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.²¹ The United States, like much of the developed world, depends overwhelmingly on imports to satisfy domestic demand for seafood products. The U.S. market for imported seafood is the second largest in the world after Japan.²² However, in many cases, seafood that is caught in the United States, such as Alaskan salmon, is processed abroad and then sent back to the United States.²³ This action increases the complexity of the seafood supply chain and means that U.S.-caught seafood may be associated with human rights abuse.

Fortunately, the fact that seafood slavery and IUU fishing have common drivers means they share common solutions. Policies and innovations that increase transparency in seafood supply chains make it easier to monitor for unsustainable fishing practices and labor abuses in international waters. The same tools can help prevent seafood harvested illegally from being imported into the United States. In the same vein, initiatives that promote rule of law and protect workers make it harder for double-dealing boat operators to offset the costs of travel to remote protected marine areas by using cheap trafficked labor.

There is a strong bipartisan consensus among U.S. policymakers and legislators that human trafficking should be prevented and, when possible, punished wherever it occurs. To that end, over the past two decades Congress has enacted a far-reaching legal regime aimed at mobilizing a whole-of-government response to the global challenge of human trafficking. The anchor of this effort is the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, or TVPA, a landmark piece of legislation that dramatically expanded the role of the federal government in combating human trafficking both domestically and abroad.²⁴ The TVPA—which was reauthorized and substantially amended with strong bipartisan support in 2003, 2006, 2008, and 2013—created a powerful set of anti-trafficking tools and programs distributed across multiple federal agencies. It also established a cabinet-level task force to coordinate anti-trafficking efforts, currently chaired by the secretary of state.²⁵

One pillar of U.S. anti-trafficking efforts has been the introduction of criminal penalties for a wide range of trafficking activities. Most of these penalties relate to domestic trafficking violations—that is, trafficking committed by U.S. citizens or companies or involving victims trafficked inside or into the United States.²⁶ But U.S. law also authorizes the prosecution of some forms of trafficking that occur abroad. Of these authorizations, the most significant is a provision of the 2008 TVPA reauthorization that bars U.S. citizens and companies from benefitting indirectly from human trafficking by knowingly or recklessly participating in a “venture” that uses or provides trafficked labor.²⁷ This prohibition on financial benefit from trafficking means that any U.S. firm whose contractors or subcontractors engaged in human trafficking could theoretically be subject to criminal prosecution or civil liability—provided there is adequate evidence that employees of the firm knew about the abuses or looked the other way.

In addition to punishing traffickers and those who benefit from trafficking, federal law also restricts imports of goods produced by trafficked labor. Section 307 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, passed more than 85 years ago in 1930, provides that “all goods, wares, articles, and merchandise mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part in any foreign country by convict labor and/or forced labor . . . shall not be entitled to entry at any of the ports of the United States.”²⁸

On its face, this ban is sweeping and of potentially broad impact. But for most of section 307’s existence, its effects were blunted by a major caveat: It did not apply to goods that were not produced in sufficient quantities inside the United States to meet domestic consumer demand. A strict reading of this limitation, commonly referred to as the “consumptive demand loophole,” could mean that any type of merchandise that reached U.S. consumers primarily through importation rather than being made or grown inside the United States—for example, tropical fruit—could be admitted even if it was the result of slave labor.²⁹ This loophole applies to most of the goods commonly produced with forced labor, which, along with logistical challenges in investigating labor conditions abroad, resulted in meager enforcement of section 307 in the decades following its enactment. Between 1930 and 2015 the provision was enforced only 38 times, mostly in connection with goods produced by Chinese prisoners.³⁰

In February of this year, Congress removed the consumptive demand loophole from section 307, potentially clearing the way for more aggressive enforcement of the Tariff Act’s ban on slave-made goods.³¹ Revelations about seafood slavery were a major impetus for the removal of the ban. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), one of the sponsors of the law that closed the loophole, told The New York Times, “Most Americans were horrified to learn that the fish in the pet food they give to their cats and dogs was being caught by children forced to work on ships against their will.”³²

In theory, the amended section 307 and the 2008 TVPA reauthorization could serve as powerful deterrents against the use of human trafficking in the seafood industry. In practice, however, their effect has been and will likely continue to be limited. As currently enforced, both of these authorities—and other federal and state laws with potential application to overseas trafficking—require evidence tying a known user of trafficked labor to merchandise destined for or already inside the United States. Yet the complex nature of seafood supply chains, in which a fish changes hands multiple times and is often commingled with catch from other vessels, can frustrate efforts to determine chain of custody from point of production to a U.S. port—let alone to the ultimate consumer.

These challenges in linking abuses to merchandise are a key reason for the U.S. Department of Justice’s failure, as of this writing, to bring any criminal case concerning seafood-related labor abuses occurring outside the United States, despite extensive coverage of the issue. The opacity of seafood supply chains also helps explain why Customs and Border Protection, or CBP—the agency within the Department of Homeland Security that administers the Tariff Act—has yet to bring a seafood-related enforcement action under section 307 and is unlikely to do so going forward. CBP’s current enforcement model requires “reasonable but not conclusive” evidence that merchandise from a specific producer was produced with forced labor, a standard that in practice appears to require CBP both to obtain direct evidence of abuses at a production site as well as individualized chain of custody information relating to a specific shipment.³³

Given the competing institutional priorities at the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, meaningful law enforcement action against seafood slavery is only likely to occur if leaders at these two agencies agree to prioritize overseas trafficking and secure sufficient resources to investigate forced labor outside the United States. A recent civil suit brought by trafficked Cambodian laborers against major suppliers of seafood to large U.S. retailers, which survived a motion for summary judgment and is now scheduled for trial, could provide an instructive pilot case.³⁴ If the plaintiffs prevail—or reach a favorable settlement—it will send a strong signal that seafood slavery is not beyond the reach of U.S. law.

Finally, it bears noting that the Department of Justice and CBP are not identically situated with respect to punishing seafood slavery: As an enforcer of criminal statutes, the Department of Justice can only bring a case when it is confident that it can establish beyond a reasonable doubt that a specific person or company is complicit in human trafficking. CBP, by contrast, has considerable discretion in how it chooses to enforce the Tariff Act. Should the agency choose to revise the regulation currently governing enforcement of section 307—which is already outdated following the repeal of the consumptive demand loophole—it could potentially adopt a less restrictive approach to goods produced with slave labor.

Law enforcement and customs are just one strand of the wider U.S. campaign against human trafficking. Foreign assistance is another key line of effort with implications for seafood slavery. Here, the United States has played a constructive and influential role in moving the international community toward a strong anti-trafficking position and in encouraging and enabling foreign governments to address human trafficking within their own borders. These activities have brought greater scrutiny to slavery in the seafood sector, but the scale of the problem demands greater mobilization of resources and more cross-cutting programming.

The most prominent foreign policy initiative relating to human trafficking is the U.S. Department of State’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report, or TIP Report, which sorts the world’s countries into four tiers based on their efforts to combat human trafficking.³⁵ Countries that are assigned to the lowest tier—Tier 3—are subject to discretionary sanctions that include withholding of nonhumanitarian and nontrade aid, including advocating against assistance provided through international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.³⁶ But the purpose of the TIP Report and the information collection that supports it is not exclusively—or even primarily—punitive. Rather, it is intended to help address the problem within a designated Tier 3 country by providing an empirical and analytic basis for a range of associated programmatic activities, such as direct state-to-state assistance to support investigation and prosecution of human trafficking and funding for both government and NGO-implemented anti-trafficking initiatives.

Other important initiatives include the U.S. Department of Labor’s annual list of goods produced with forced labor or child labor, the development of a classified national intelligence estimate on human trafficking by the U.S. intelligence community, and a spectrum of anti-trafficking programs and projects funded and coordinated by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, in conjunction with the agency’s Counter-Trafficking in Persons Policy. Together these programs contribute to what the State Department has called a “three P paradigm” to stop human trafficking: prevention, protection, and prosecution.³⁷

These programs have addressed seafood slavery to varying degrees. For example, the TIP Report has mentioned seafood-related trafficking in 65 countries between 2010 and 2016, 15 of which were assigned a Tier 3 rating at some point during those seven years. The reports identified places such as Thailand, Burma, Indonesia, and Fiji as centers of seafood slavery before they received attention in