While forced labour exists throughout the world, nowhere is the problem more rampant than in the South China Sea, and especially in the Thai fishing fleet. Tens of thousands of migrants from Cambodia and Myanmar are whispered into Thailand each year to make up a chronic shortfall of mariners. Then, unscrupulous captains buy and sell the men and boys.
With rising fuel prices and fewer fish close to shore, maritime labour researchers predict that more boats will resort to venturing farther out to sea, making the mistreatment of migrants more likely. The work is brutal. Captains require crew members to simply do what they were told, when they were told. No complaints are tolerated, no matter how long the hours, how little the food, or how paltry the pay. In short, these captains rely on sea slaves.
Life at sea is cheap, said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division. Conditions are worsening, he says, because of lax maritime labour laws and an insatiable global demand for seafood, even as overfishing depletes fish stocks.
Thailand’s fishing fleet consists mostly of bottom trawlers, which drag a wall of mesh behind them. Purse seiners use more rudimentary circular nets that are dropped to target fish closer to the water’s surface, hauled upward, then constrained at the top like a drawstring coin purse. To ensure the 50ft mouth of the nets closed properly, the boys dove into the inky-black sea. If one of them was to get tangled in the mesh and yanked into the fathoms below, it was likely that no one would notice right away over the frenzy, darkness, and noise.
2019 THE IRISH TIMES