The irony of our Christmas generosity is its link to modern slavery

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This was published 6 years ago

The irony of our Christmas generosity is its link to modern slavery

By Grace Forrest

It's a given that every Christmas our minds turn to family and friends. But the irony of modern slavery is that even as we try to be generous and caring we can unintentionally prop up global enterprises that thrive off slavery.

I'm in Thailand at the moment, a hot spot for slavery and a hot spot for the seafood that we import by the bucket-load to fill up the barbecue on Christmas day. At the docks, just an hour from Bangkok, you can readily see the faces of fishermen and women who exist or have existed in slave-like conditions – something we have only started to understand in recent years.

We unknowingly trade human rights for 70 per cent of the frozen seafood that Australia consumes every year.

We unknowingly trade human rights for 70 per cent of the frozen seafood that Australia consumes every year.Credit: Alita Ong

Slavery is largely invisible to consumers, in part because it disproportionately affects the most vulnerable and marginalised in many societies, who are often women and girls.

The Walk Free Foundation and United Nations agencies estimate 71 per cent of the 40.3 million people trapped in modern slavery are women. They make up a huge proportion of those forced into labour, and also make up the vast majority of people in forced marriage and commercial sexual exploitation.

Grace Forrest is Founding Director of the Walk Free Foundation.

Grace Forrest is Founding Director of the Walk Free Foundation.

What makes the fishing industry different is that it doesn't discriminate: both men and women are trafficked and held in situations of slavery in various aspects of the business.

These workers are often at sea for years at a time, and we hear stories of people being left behind on remote Pacific islands if they protest, or sometimes just thrown overboard. They work under threat of violence, often bound by false or inflated debts, or placed in situations where they aren't paid and can't leave their jobs without serious consequences. The majority of these people are cross-border migrants (from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia) looking for work to provide for their families.

One fisherman I spoke with told me he was at sea for six years, and was paid around 20¢ an hour. "We saw men thrown overboard and killed for questioning the captain, sometimes people would faint from exhaustion," he said.

Another migrant worker from Myanmar, liberated by a local NGO, said "there was never enough food and the water purifier [to convert ocean to drinking water] did not work properly, many of us got very sick."

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We unknowingly trade the human rights of these people for cheap seafood, with almost 70 per cent of Australia's seafood consumption supplied by imports mainly from Thailand and other parts of Asia.

And by the time this catch finds its way onto the shelf of an Australian store or your barbecue hotplate, every trace of this abuse has been scrubbed clean.

So why does it still happen?

Firstly, because seafood supply chains are particularly complex, and difficult to untangle. The source of seafood is often poorly documented given the prevalence of transhipping at sea (where boats exchange cargo without docking at an official port), seafood re-exportation and numerous stages of processing.

The irony of modern slavery is that even as we try to be generous and caring we can unintentionally prop up global enterprises that thrive off slavery.

Who knew prawns could be so complicated?

The Issara Institute and International Justice Mission recently conducted a large survey of commercial fishing in Thailand. It found 76 per cent of workers were in debt bondage and almost 38 per cent had been trafficked into the Thai fishing industry.

Trafficking flows to Thailand mostly originate from Myanmar, currently the site of South Asia's worst humanitarian crisis with the mass migration of several hundred thousand Rohingya refugees. In the pursuit of slave-free supply chains in Australia and our region, accessible, legal and safe migration pathways are critical.

On top of that, another reason you could easily end up eating slavery-related seafood on Christmas Day is that we don't have laws or systems that track slavery.

You can tell from a tin can label if your food has GMO ingredients or is dolphin-friendly, however there is no way to know whether slave labour has been used to make the products we buy and consume. Essentially, our laws and regulations do not require transparency from Australian businesses who purchase products from abroad.

With bipartisan support, the Australian parliament has recently taken steps to correct this. This month, a committee set up to explore the issue published its report, recommending that Australia pass a Modern Slavery Act and appoint an independent commissioner to keep an eye on abuses here and in the supply chains of Australian companies operating abroad.

Among the report's recommendations for inclusions into the new law are greater regulation of labour hire companies, measures to tackle orphanage tourism (where tourists are encouraged to donate money to scam orphanages), and modern slavery reporting by governments on its own supply chains (the biggest supply chains in the world). It's a great first step to admitting this a problem and responsibly addressing it.

As consumers we have much more power than we realise. In recent years parts of the global seafood supply chains have become much more visible because of direct pressure from media and consumers.

It is going to take a government-level solution to have any chance of systemically unravelling all of this, and consumer voices in support can ensure it remains prioritised. Governments should play a role in ensuring that seafood is legally caught, humanely produced and honestly labelled, and supply chain audits are fundamental to that.

This means incorporating labour practices in national supply chain policy and legislation to provide consumers with confidence that their seafood is both environmentally sustainable and ethically caught.

Industry leaders must also step up. While some leaders like Thai Union are doing their best to ensure slave-free supply chains, it is incredibly difficult for them to do this without national (and perhaps regional) legislation.

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We can and should do more to confront modern slavery within our own consumer habits. This Christmas, let's demand quality not only in the products we buy but in the lives of the people behind them.

Grace Forrest is the Founding Director of the Walk Free Foundation.

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