As people around the globe stock their pantries for long stretches at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, sales of tinned tuna are going through the roof. In the U.S., consumption has increased 142% compared to the same time last year.
But a new report released last month by environmental NGO Greenpeace highlights concerns about the ethical and legal credentials of many top tuna brands. The report is based on interviews with migrant fishers on three vessels operating in the Atlantic Ocean that are flagged or linked with Taiwan, including two longliners and a carrier that transports crew and fish to and from longliners. It suggests that forced labor and illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing continue to occur within major tuna supply chains, despite efforts by companies and governments to stamp them out.
One of the vessels that interviewees accused of these practices supplies tuna to the Taiwan-based Fong Chun Formosa Fishery Company (FCF), one of the world’s largest tuna traders and the new owner of major U.S. canned-tuna brand Bumble Bee. Another of the accused vessels supplies tuna to a refrigerated cargo ship that FCF works with.
The fishers’ allegations included deception, physical violence, wage deductions, debt bondage, passport confiscation, and excessive working hours. For example, several fishers reported working 18-hour days, on average, and as many as 34 hours straight: We only got to sleep for five hours if and when we caught some fish, said one interviewee. If we didn’t catch anything, we’d just have to keep working. Crew were also transferred illegally between vessels.
The fishers also provided evidence that the vessels took part in unlawful fishing practices, such as shark finning and transferring shark fins between vessels.
Reports of human rights abuses and IUU fishing have plagued the tuna industry in recent years, and several investigations have identified the practices of Taiwanese distant-water longliner vessels as particularly problematic. In 2015, the European Commission (the executive arm of the European Union) gave Taiwan a yellow card for insufficient cooperation in combatting IUU fishing, warning the country that if it did not improve, it would not be able to export products from its vessels to the EU. Recently, the Taiwanese government has implemented new controls to prevent IUU fishing and reformed its fisheries legal framework in an effort to improve its products’ traceability. In June 2019, the European Commission lifted Taiwan’s yellow card in acknowledgment of these efforts.
FCF did not respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment. The company has also made considerable effort to improve its track record in recent years, including releasing a new corporate social responsibility policy and participating in two Fishery Improvement Projects (FIPs), which are multi-stakeholder efforts to improve the environmental sustainability of particular fisheries.
But Greenpeace East Asia campaigner Pearl Chen told Mongabay in an email that FCF’s efforts are insufficient and out of step with national and international standards. For example, she said the company’s policy fails to specify a guaranteed amount of rest time for crew, which is not compatible with either Taiwan’s domestic regulations or the International Labour Organization’s Work in Fishing convention. Chen also pointed out that the FIPs that FCF participates in cover only a fifth of the longliners the company sources from, so its environmental commitments don’t apply to most of its supply.
In response to a 2018 report from Greenpeace that also linked FCF to human rights abuses on longliner vessels, a company statement said, we are disappointed that they are implicating FCF in old incidents and cases that have since been in all instances addressed in coordination with the Taiwanese Fisheries Department.
But the cases the new report cites are from 2019, Greenpeace senior oceans adviser Andy Shen told Mongabay. These are fresh cases, he said. That’s why we wanted to let the public know and let FCF know that we know that this is still occurring, and it’s occurring because there are systemic issues with the Taiwanese industry.
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