A lot of press covers the many ecological impacts of illegal fishing, but these articles often overlook how illegal fishing perpetuates slavery and human rights violations at sea. Marine pillaging by illegal fishing benefits from human suffering with systems that support forced labor, further driving environmental degradation in a devastating feedback loop. Forced labor is not at the conversational forefront of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, yet it sheds light on a simple truth of high seas crime: its hidden nature allows for a plethora of illicit activities. IUU fishing is highly lucrative and provides transshipment and logistic solutions that create a playground for the black market of human, drug, small arms and trafficking.

As a society we may be becoming desensitized to crimes against the environment. Living within an extractive economy, the lines between acceptable,  morally skewed or outright illegal activities can be hazy when it comes to ecological damages. But there should be no grey area in violations against human rights. Through direct links to transnational organized crime syndicates, IUU fishing results in reduced national sovereignty, abused humans and stolen lives.

According to Maritime Security Review, IUU fishing robs the global economy of $23 billion annually, through “lost tax revenues, lost economic opportunities, lost jobs and above all, an expanding, slippery, dangerous black market exploiting human and natural resources.” With stakes this high, corruption runs rampant and the incentive to turn a blind eye is large for many involved. Further supporting the destruction, powerful fishing fleets who are widely known to engage in suspicious activities such as flying flags of convenience and disabling AIS tracking devices while at sea continue to receive subsidies as defined by the World Trade Organization. These fleets overpower enforcement efforts of small coastal nations to trespass on exclusive economic zones (EEZs), overharvest protected species, and wreak habitat destruction with outlawed fishing equipment.

IUU fishing creates a simple, yet pernicious, feedback loop. Overfishing leads to depleted stocks, making it more difficult for fishers to procure yields comparable to the past. With decreased catch, vessel owners seek to minimize their costs. Whereas fuel is a fixed cost, labor is not. Resorting to forced labor increases profits and operational capacity. Consequently, stocks continue to be overfished, habitats destroyed, and the ecosystem’s depletion is funded by human exploitation.

This abusive cycle begins with vicious “recruitment” practices and continues with intolerable working conditions and life onboard IUU vessels. Deception permeates the hiring process, when there is one. Sometimes there is no hiring process and people are taken against their will. Recruitment efforts are often focused on communities with limited employment opportunities, and strategies to recruit crew range from misrepresenting the nature of employment to drugging and kidnapping. The communities targeted are often considered vulnerable due to their lack of regulatory enforcement. There are many reports of villagers being misled and made to provide collateral to be hired. This collateral is often a crucial personal belonging, such as a school certificate required for future employment, passport, or land deed. Recruits are also often made to pay devastating fees for paperwork and travel expenses under a spurious contract promising the victim to make enough money to easily pay back fees. Instead their contracts are not honored, the fees become impossible to pay back, and victims end up in “debt bondage.” These coercive hiring practices ensure servitude and strip power from crew. It is not uncommon for deckhands of illegally operating ships to return home in debt from their time at sea.

Onboard, crew members have endured physical, psychological and sexual abuse, been denied medical care for injuries and illnesses, forced to work for days at a time with negligible sleep, starved or given rotten food, denied pay, and at times even shackled. Crew members and their families may be threatened if they seek departure from the ship or disclose onboard conditions once they disembark. In extreme, but sadly not infrequent situations, the violence can result in murder and no one is held accountable. Due to high levels of shame and fear of retribution, these violent crimes go unreported and the cycle continues. This is especially true where individuals in vulnerable communities remain unaware of the devious hiring practices and devastating abuses onboard.

In his book Outlaw Ocean, Ian Urbina describes the lack of accountability for bad actors at sea. In land-based crimes, at the very least an organization’s reputation may be on the line. In the maritime world motivation to respond to investigators and reporters dissolves, “where all the actors seem to set their own ethical and moral compasses in different directions.” Evidence, witnesses, and even clearly defined laws can be impossible to pin down on the high seas, so heinous crimes often fall through the cracks. Urbina goes on to explain that even when an investigator manages to contact an individual involved in a crime, inquiries are just passed on to another party in an endless cycle of diffused responsibility. Meanwhile, witnesses are threatened, paychecks are withheld and violence is used to silence informers.

Understanding these significant holes in the maritime justice system helps illustrate how so often human rights are violated without detection. People go missing at sea and when a murder is prosecuted, the charges may fall on a low-ranking and perhaps innocent employee. An example of this is illustrated in a case where a Thai fishing boat was linked to a young man named Eril Andrade’s murder. Step Up Marine Enterprise, a recruiting agency, was investigated for his death and for supporting human trafficking. A great deal of effort went into prosecuting those involved, a rarity in IUU fishing crimes. This seemed like a win for justice in IUU fishing. However, in the end the owners and management team of this heavily incriminated company were mildly reprimanded and only one person has been imprisoned for Mr. Andrade’s death: a likely innocent recruiter. Celia Robelo, a mother to young children and a recruiter from Mr. Andrade’s village, faces life in prison for her role in assisting young men to find work on ships. She claims she had no knowledge of the abuses that occurred onboard, and her finders fees were pennies compared to what the owners of the enterprise make. Regardless, she is the sole person locked away in this feeble attempt to impart justice on illegal fishing.

An important question to ask yourself is how might you be contributing to these human injustices in the high seas? At present, the seafood industry does not make it easy for consumers to know if the product is what it claims to be, let alone hold suppliers accountable about where they have sourced their product. There are ways to take action and demand a shift in the seafood industry, much as other industries have received pressure to reform and enhance accountability. In the meantime, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch provides a helpful and user-friendly tool to assess sustainability of seafood choices. An approximate three billion people depend on seafood for their livelihood, and food sourced from the sea has potential to reduce global carbon emissions. The industry is not (and should not be) going away because it is needed to supply food and nutrition, but it needs to be dramatically reformed to eliminate IUU fishing.

While protecting fish stocks is vitally important for food security, so too is protecting the workers who do these dangerous jobs. Many NGOs and nonprofit organizations have stepped into the arena to take on the devastation that is IUU fishing, but these efforts are not enough. To this end, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has initiated the Agreement on Port State Measures. A multi-organization partnership called Global Fishing Watch has taken significant steps towards enhancing vessel accountability by collecting evidence of illegal fishing behaviors, making this information public and helping to build legal cases. The World Trade Organization can do its part to encourage countries to cut off subsidies for fleets which are known to be engaging in IUU fishing behavior. Consumers can catalyze these efforts by demanding full accountability and traceability from the seafood industry. In the US, the proposed ‘Illegal Fishing and Forced Labor Prevention Act’ would require all seafood species imported into the US to be traceable to the vessel which caught it, and only allow its import if it was not caught through forced labor practices.

IUU fishing threatens food and economic security, and opens doors for other illicit activities that threaten human rights at large. It is seen as a global security threat by militaries and other security professionals around the world, and should be framed as such in policy efforts to eliminate these dangerous crime circuits. No single country can take on the fleets that engage in illegal activities on the high seas, therefore unified efforts must be catalyzed. Wild and prolific, the seas are endlessly challenging to regulate but with informed consumers, congressional support and pressured industries, it is entirely feasible to combat human rights violations at sea.