Why Should We Care if China is the Superpower of Seafood? | with Ian Urbina
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And welcome once again to Why Should We Care About the Indo-Pacific, brought to you by our producer, IEJ Media, and our sponsor, Power Group Asia. More about both of them in due course. I am Ray Powell. I am the former military officer sitting here in California over there in New York. We have Jim Caruso, the former diplomat. Jim, the cat that lived in my house moved out along with my daughter, but you are now living with your daughter's cat. Will the cat be joining us for today's episode?

You know, I was so pleased when you got rid of your cat, and now I am the cat. That's so funny.

All right. Well, we're not going to talk as much about cats today. We're going to talk a lot about fish and squid and shrimp with Ian Urbina. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist who spent 17 years with The New York Times. He is now the founder and director of the Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization dedicated to exposing human rights, environmental and labor crimes on the high seas.

Some of you will remember that back last year, he joined us on episode 10, and he is now back to tell us about the season two of his acclaimed Outlaw Ocean podcast series. Now, Ian, when you were with us last time, you talked about China as being the superpower of seafood. So why should we care if China is the superpower of seafood?

A couple of reasons. One, much of the seafood we eat is sort of coming from the ships that are this distant water fleet, but also processed on land in China.

And we are in a trade war with China. And so that's a source of concern, I think, for just average American consumers. I think secondly, you know, a lot of these ships, you know, in China's fleet are engaging in illegal behaviors, illegal fishing, human rights abuses that obviously matter on a legal and ethical level, but they also matter on an economic level in terms of

giving China a competitive advantage vis-a-vis industries in the U.S., seafood industry in the U.S. It's very hard to compete with those vessels if you intend to, if you, an American vessel or European vessel, intend to play by the rules. So that also should matter because increasingly that will put the

the better actors, the law abiding actors out of business. But lastly, and maybe more to your sort of focus area, the geopolitical kind of ramifications on the water, sort of the exertion of power in key places are happening by creating, you know,

often what's called facts on the ground, you know, where just by establishing a presence in a certain place, you're setting a precedent whereby you can more effectively argue the nine dash line. You know, you can more effectively say, hey, look, we have had our fishing fleet in those so-called contested waters for a decade now to the tune of, you know,

6,000 of them. And therefore, when you be at Philippines or Indonesia or the US, argue before some international body that the Chinese

presence there should not be normalized and we, our fishing vessels or our merchant vessels want to go through that area without being obstructed. If we have an argument at the international court or some sort, the China, Chinese fleet and the Chinese government are going to be much better equipped to make that argument because they've got a long established presence in the region and we don't. So that's another sort of

concern about allowing this to unfold over years and years, that they're going to have an upper hand on our ability to then sort of enter or control or have free passage through certain areas. Help us understand the nature of this fleet. Are these one company owned by the state? Are these individual fishermen? Do they get direction from the state on where they should or should not fish?

So let's just first talk about size, right? You know, there are a lot of different... And definition. So we're talking about the distant water fleet. So by that, we mean those vessels that are on the high seas or they're in foreign waters, okay? Not near shore fleet. These are mostly industrial vessels. So they're large vessels, typically with crews over 20. Normally on squid vessels, which we looked at specifically, they're crews of about 40, all males. Now,

how big is the fleet? The Chinese government has the official number at about 2,700. Some think tanks have put the number up around 17,000. We at the Outlaw Ocean Project looked at it

crunch data, spent a lot of time quality controlling and came up with the number of 6,500. So the numbers are murky and shifting, but the bottom line is even the most conservative number, 2,700, is bigger than the next largest fleet, the Taiwanese, by a factor over three. So they're just colossal by comparison. And I

About a third of them have some state involvement, a third of the companies that run these fleets. Typically, the fleets run from three ships to 30 ships. And these are kind of semi-fully private or semi-private Chinese companies. And then in terms of your last question, Jim, the Chinese government says different things at different times about its actual control over the fleet. Sometimes it says...

We don't have any control of the fleet, much like any other nation doesn't really control its private actors that are out doing business in the space. And therefore, we can't be faulted for some bad apples in that industry.

Other times, you see through their actions that the Chinese government actually can exert control. So for example, there was a lot of bad press around the Chinese fleet being too close and crossing the line into the Galapagos waters, Ecuadorian waters near Galapagos. And, you know...

dozens upon dozens in 2020 of articles ran about the sort of incursions and presence and buildup of Chinese vessels there. Chinese have been going there for, you know, a decade prior, but it just got noticed in that year and caused a big flurry. A year after, um,

the Chinese government put a note out to the fleet and said, no one go within 50 miles of that line because we don't want the headache and the bad press. And if you look at the satellite information, they listened, right? The vast majority of the fleet backed off and they were nowhere near. So that does imply that if the Chinese government says something, their fleet listens most often. So it's a bit of a mixed bag in terms of how much control they have.

A lot of your work with Outlaw Ocean focuses in on really life aboard ship and what the life is like for these laborers aboard these fishing vessels. And you yourself have spent time aboard some of these ships. This year, you spend a lot of time on squid. What is a squid jigger and what is life like for laborers aboard squid jigger?

Squid jigger, there are various types of fishing, industrial scale fishing vessels, purse seiners and trawlers and jiggers. Jiggers just refers to the type of gear that's used. They're really fascinating, weird looking, kind of Dickensian gear.

vessels. They have these kind of 10 foot metal arms that come off the side and they almost look like metal conveyor belts, even though there's no moving part of that sort. They stretch out over the water. And at the end is this spool that's basically taking a down line, which is the filament that is the hooks, a series of hooks. And

bouncing that line up and down in the water with bait on it. And each down line might have maybe 20 hooks, right? And the jig is going up and down continuously. Now take that one arm and multiply it times, there are about maybe 200 of them encircling the ship. And you have this huge vessel with all these metal arms coming out the side. The

The squid jiggers also intensely fish at light. And so they have these bowling ball sized bulbs of which there are maybe 150 of them. They're incredibly bright. You can see them over 100 miles away. The only thing you can see from space in certain areas of the ocean are these fleets with these massively bright lights. They're very hot. And so it makes a weird sort of city of light spectacle if you go out to the fishing grounds where there are hundreds of these ships.

And then on board, you've got 40 guys, pre-2020, 40, 50, 30 guys. Typically on a Chinese vessel, you're dealing with maybe eight to 10 are Chinese officers. And then the rest are colonels.

crew, if you will. And the crew prior to COVID were largely, historically were foreign. So Indonesian especially, but COVID locked everything down, made it tough to get, you know, move workers around. And so China sort of looked inland and started recruiting more Chinese rural poor, you know, from inland China. So those vessels, when we were

on the water visiting them in a bunch of places were almost completely Chinese crew. And the experience is typically, jiggers are interesting because they also go very far from shore. The fishing grounds tend to be very far away. And they also kind of make this really long tour almost all the way around the planet. So their tours tend to be very long, you know, two years sometimes.

contractually. We even met some guys who were on three-year contracts, and that means they don't get off the vessel for three years. They might be in port, but they're not allowed to step on land. So these are brutal stints and no Wi-Fi. Living conditions are just really gross, really cramped and dirty and a lot of problems of malnutrition. The diet's very poor. So this is what it looks like.

So are they doing anything that contradicts or violates international law in regards to working conditions, how they fish, where they fish? So that's question one. Question two is, do we have the ability to trace where things produced illegally end up in our food supply?

No to the second question, but I'll unpack that more. To the first question, yes. And let me unpack that. So China, again, this is based on a half dozen pretty rigorous peer-reviewed studies that have been done. China has more proclivity to IUU illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing than any other fleet on the

the planet. So this fleet is engaged more often in misbehavior purely from the perspective of fisheries regulations, wrong gear, not allowed to go there, invading marine protected areas, fishing out of season, taking more catch than they're supposed to, taking species they're not licensed to, and on and on and on. These are the sorts of regulations that they would...

that they've been documented to break pretty consistently. The one that really gets attention is the incursions, right? So you've got a big problem, Argentinian waters, because there's a, there's a, what's called the blue hole, which is a very rich fishing ground near Falkland islands. And the China, one of the Chinese fleets of about two, 250, 250 vessels annually round the Southern tip and head up the coast of Argentina. And,

A bunch of them regularly go into Argentinian waters and fish there when they're not allowed to. So you've got this kind of behavior pretty prevalent in the fleet. Now, on the labor side, yes, also pretty severe violations. Are they breaking Chinese law? Not so much, you know, because Chinese labor laws are...

a little bit anemic, shall we say. But when it comes to sort of international norms of what constitutes human trafficking, for example...

crew that gets sick and asked to see a doctor not allowed, passport confiscation, debt bondage, meaning you get on the ship and you already have a debt and you're working to pay off that debt. These are pretty traditional and widely recognized forms of forced labor, not to mention violence on crew, i.e.,

Malnutrition, poor living condition, et cetera. So generally, folks believe this constitutes forced labor. Now, it's your supply chain question, Jim. No, this is kind of a core problem with this product that is seafood. For too long, as different from, say,

an iPhone or Nike shoes or a tomato with seafood because of so many handoffs and because the supply chain is so long and many parts of it are in places that are completely off radar. And,

China or the high seas, there is no true traceability so that a consumer or a company can say, we know for sure that this product X came from a legal and ethical and sustainable set of

Because, for example, the certification programs that exist, these are private programs that companies pay to be a part of to get a stamp of approval. Marine Stewardship Council is the most known. Even those programs, if you press them, you'll find out they don't actually do, they don't board ships. They don't check on ships. So the data they have from ships about living conditions or what was caught is self-reported by the captains.

Okay, well, you figure out how many teeth that has in it. And then if you get on land, wait, so you guys are verifying and certifying that this factory was clean, not using bad drugs, not abusing its people, etc.? Yes.

Okay, so did you spot check it? Well, in China, that's not really kosher. You can't show up unannounced. You have to tell them when you're going to show up. Okay, well, doesn't that kind of undermine the whole point of a spot check? Like, if they know you're coming next Wednesday, aren't they going to clean up the shop?

Yeah, but that's how it works in China and you can't operate in the country and not play by their rules. So there is a bit of a ruse in the certification mechanisms that exist that make supply chain very dark.

In trying to tell this story on your podcast in season two, you chose one particular deckhand, a guy named Daniel from Indonesia, and you sort of told his story. Why did you pick his story? And what should our audience, what would your audience, what should your audience take away from that story? So this guy, Daniel Aretanong, Indonesian young guy, kind of like the textbook version

archetype character who ends up taking one of these jobs from a tiny village in Indonesia and

applied to the local factory, couldn't get a job, graduated from high school, applied to the mini-mart, no offer, tinkering with his dad in the auto body shop he had in the village, really going nowhere. He and his buddy, Daniel's buddy, who's also 21,

say like, Hey, we've seen some guys come back and they looked all right. And they had gone and gotten a job on one of these fishing vessels that goes on the high seas. That sounds wild and fun chance to see the world, make some money, come back and

We see that they bought an ox for their uncle and a new roof on mom's house. Like, and they got a nice moped. Like, why don't we roll the dice and give it a try? And so that's exactly what Daniel and his buddy did. They kind of sought out a firm, said we'd like to be considered for that work. They get a call, Hey, head to Jakarta. And then from Jakarta, we're going to fly you to both. You're going to fly to Busan, South Korea, and you're going to get on a vessel.

Great. Let's do it. Oh, by the way, you got to front the money. So you're going to be paying for the trip to Jakarta and the trip to the, and then, you know, that's coming out of your pocket. And then in Bursa, Busan, we will paper you, meaning give you a contract and you'll get on the ship. Okay. Not great. So Daniel borrows money from, you know, this cousin, that uncle, whatnot to pay for the trip gets there. Then Daniel,

they ultimately get on the ship after a couple weeks of waiting and kind of running out of funds to even feed themselves, etc. Turns out to be a Chinese squid ship. All right, now jump to the end of the story. Daniel gets dumped by

on a dock in Uruguay in the middle of the night, 2 a.m. to be exact. His body is covered in bruises. He has ligature marks, meaning rope marks around his neck. His hands and feet are horrifically swollen. I've seen the pictures. His body's there. He's alive, but barely. Someone sees the body, calls an ambulance. He dies at a hospital in Montevideo a couple hours later.

All right. So this is the arc of Daniel, right? He's the textbook launch case. And then in some ways, the textbook end case, because a statistic that grabbed me and one of the reasons I wanted to focus on Daniel was the five years prior to Daniel's body landing on that port in Montevideo.

Every six months, one dead body was dropped off at the dock in Montevideo from these fishing vessels. One dead body every six months. All right. That's a striking statistic. And that's just one port in a place that doesn't have that much traffic. And you've got that kind of death rate coming through. So I thought, well, let's take a look at this guy and how he died and what his...

trajectory was and use that as sort of synecdoche for this crazy statistic about the death rate of guys on these vessels that are not being investigated and showing up in pretty bad shape. So we spent a year and a half investigating what happened to Daniel, and it's what you can probably intuit. He was beaten. He suffered from severe malnutrition and ended up with a disease called beriberi, which causes...

you know, atrocious swelling. And he begged to be released. We interviewed, you know, other crew members from his same vessel and pieced together a story and got government documents, et cetera. And ultimately when he was about to die, finally the captain said, hey, offload this guy and drop him off someplace. We got to get him off the vessel so that we're not. And so they dropped them off in Montevideo. All right. So two questions. One is, was there any

any effect on the fishing vessel or the captain or the crew, any punishment too? You said there are no longer so many foreigners on these Chinese vessels. Who's taking the place? If it's Chinese citizens, are they being treated better? Yeah. So on the first one,

Last two weeks ago, Customs and Border Patrol in the U.S. announced what's called a WRO, which is withhold release order. It's a stop order. And essentially it says, hey, we got a problem with this company called X. No product tied to that company is allowed to come into the U.S. And it's a targeted sanctions that occurs. The Zenfa 7 is the name of the ship that Daniel was on. All right.

A law firm, after we published our investigation, a nonprofit organization of lawyers here in D.C. said, we want to try to get a stop order on the Zenfos 7 because of Daniel's investigation.

So they worked with our staff for about a year and customs and border submitted a whole huge petition. And that was granted two weeks ago. And so small, you know, will that affect the industry? No, I'm not deluding myself. Is it a symbolic big deal? It is. It's not often that vessels of any sort get a stop order. Because you said there's no traceability. Yeah. Yeah. In this case, it, so your question I thought was,

For normal people on planet Earth, for a guy like me who spends three years piecing together, like for an investigative journalist, yes, you can trace it. That's what we do. You know, it takes an obscenely long time and a lot of effort, but that's not what normal people, consumers or taxpayers should have to deal with to try to be able to or companies to.

So there is no traceability under normal circumstances, but for a team of investigative journalists, you can piece it together. And in the Zenfaw 7 case, we pieced it meticulously together and the government acted. Now, your second question, treatment of the newborn, kind of the newfangled demographic that are on those vessels.

Interesting. If you know how to mine Chinese court records, which I didn't before this, but learned from some of my staffers, you can open up a fascinating universe of...

documents about mutinies and labor disputes on Chinese vessels. It's pretty well documented in their own archives. And we luckily have some staffers who know how to get it. And so what we found is a lot of the same debt bondage and abuse and violence are

has been visited on Chinese crew. Is it as severe? I don't think so because there is a racial hierarchy, um, and a willingness to the language gap, the cultural gap, and then just the racial gap allows for more severe dehumanization of this other crew. So the stories we get are very severe when it's a foreign crew, pretty bad when it's a Chinese crew, but, um,

We mined the court record and we also mined open source. So Duyan is sort of like Chinese TikTok. We mined the heck out of that and found very open and heated disclosures from former crews saying, don't go with this company. They don't pay you. They beat. They were sort of openly talking on these forums that most Westerners don't know how to tap into about the same sort of

the bamboozlement and abuse that we were seeing from foreign crew when we could interview them in Indonesia.

So now a lot of your other reporting, especially in this season, focuses on what happens on land at these processing centers. And you go from India, you go into China, people are using Uyghur and North Korean labor. First of all, what made you focus in on

processing centers? And secondly, what was the investigation process like trying to get information on processing centers in a place like China? Yeah, I mean, we're called the outlaw ocean. And so I must confess that I'm seeing a little bit of mission creep on my own part in that I'm now like working on things that are very much on land. But it struck me that like

if we really wanted to do a good job here and look at the Chinese fleet and the through line, that is this one product that they are,

kind of monopolizing, which is seafood, then we should follow it all the way through the black box that is China, you know, and the factories, not to mention a lot of US caught or European caught seafood is processed in China and then sent back to consumers in the US and Europe and Canada. So I thought, okay, we should look into the on-land portion of this supply chain, even though it's not in our normal mandate.

I can't get a visa into China. So I never had that. But we did assemble a really good team of anonymized, protected folks in China who helped us

to take a look. And we also have some unusually talented OSI folks, open source investigators, who have Chinese language skills on staff. So they and some AI coders were sort of using big data, big processing tactics to try to look at big targets that no team of humans can get through, which is to say,

Here's a company. Let's scrape everything that's been put out on these four WeChat, Douyin, these Chinese-specific platforms and pull down all the articles, all the press releases, all the internal newsletters, all the self-shot footage by workers tied to that company that mentioned the company name. Let's pull in a massive trove of data. Right?

And then let's figure out what that data reveals. And as we did that on scale, we started honing in on, okay, Xinjiang in Western China is the most landlocked piece of land on earth.

you would not think seafood would have anything to do with Uyghurs who are in Xinjiang and defined by the US government as state-sponsored forced labor. And yet we're seeing a lot of Uyghurs in factories on the coast in China, in Shandong, and we're confused. And we're seeing this in self-shot videos and other things. So we sort of sniffed a scent and chased it. Lo and behold,

We discovered this state-run labor transfer program that really kicked up after COVID when everything locked down and there was a labor shortage even in China for Chinese in Chinese factories because the provinces were locked down, where the state said, we're getting a lot of complaints from the fishing industry. It's an important industry. They're saying they don't have enough workers to feed demand. It's because all the provinces have been locked down and folks can't travel. But there is this one demographic that we can tell, hey, get on a plane. We're moving you.

Let's move them in large numbers and get them to work. And so that's what the state did. And it began moving thousands of Uyghurs by train, plane, and bus from Xinjiang over to the coast and putting them in lockdown facilities to work seafood in these plants. So we basically used open source intelligence and investigators on the ground who could discreetly visit the plants and film and do a whole bunch of

stuff to document the number of companies that are using Uyghurs. And then we did the same basic routine in a different place in China, along the North Korean border, Dandong, for basically the same revelation regarding thousands of North Koreans that were getting shipped into the country, same basic story, held captive. Those were mostly women

almost completely women, that were being brought in to China from North Korea to work in factories. And the Uyghurs were a mix of gender. And this is, again, a situation where they're basically held captive. Yeah, in every way imaginable. Much more cut and dry than... Yeah, these are... The North Korean women seek these jobs because...

There's no way to make any viable money in North Korea. So if you can land a foreign job and the government vets you and says, okay, you're not going to defect or embarrass us, then you're happy. But you're still entering a situation of...

where you go there, you're under watchful eye at all times, you stay in a locked compound. If ever you leave to go on a shopping trip or whatever, you've got minders with you. And then what we found, which we were not expecting to find because we actually interviewed people

17 of the women, some of them in North Korea and some of them still in China, is widespread sexual abuse. So again, the standard model you can intuit, but manager says, you're going to do that. You're mine, you're property. And after hours, I want you to come and serve drinks. A bunch of buddies are going to have a game of poker and you're going to come and

on it goes from there. And then also when COVID really threw a wrench in everything, um,

A lot of the women were stuck in China but not getting a wage, and their families had borrowed money from loan sharks back in North Korea to get the money they needed to pay off the officials to get the job in China. So the loan sharks were visiting their families saying, where's my money? And the families in North Korea were saying, they're not getting paid because COVID has shut the factory, but they can't come home anymore.

So the women were then coerced into sexual work to get any sort of revenue to send home to pay off the loan sharks. So it's just layers upon layers of tragedy. Are these export-oriented processing plants? Well, that's what we focused on because obviously –

It would have more impact. And we found a large number of the biggest impact of the series was pertaining to the companies that we documented as exporting to the U.S., including, you know, to Cisco, to the congressional cafeteria, public schools in the U.S., military bases, like taxpayer funded Uncle Sam purchased seafood coming from plants that were tied to Uyghur in North Korea. And that caused obviously a huge stir. Yeah.

Well, yeah. So tell us about the stir. What's happened since then? Well, so...

priorities have shifted with the new administration. So things sort of shifted as well when that happened. In the prior administration, there was a lot of traction, including a congressional hearing. I went and testified before a panel that specializes on all matters China. And then a bipartisan letter from a bunch of lawmakers to the White House saying,

to consider this is the Biden White House, to think about in light of these revelations, maybe the U.S. government should have a sit-down conversation with, in this case, Cisco, which is the biggest food company in the world and provides most of the kind of big contracts of cafeterias and the like, including the congressional and White House companies.

contract with Cisco. And so there was a lot of movement happening by Congress leaning on various players, including DOD, talking with purchasing departments for military bases about, hey, these are not just ethical issues that taxpayer money is going to and stuff. We've got two clear laws, federal laws that say you can't touch any products that have Uyghur or... So it's Uyghur forced labor prevention.

Prevention Act and CAATSA, which is the Korean equivalent, nothing touching with North Korean labor involved in it, should be coming into the U.S. And these guys have now shown that seafood touched by both of those folks is coming to the U.S. and going to your cafeterias. But again, as all things kind of political-

It's who's in the seat, you know, and the seat that the the the folks in office changed. And so a lot of that momentum stopped. Things are kicking up again now. We've gotten, you know, a bunch of inquiries from DOD and Homeland Security and Customs and Borders action recently. So maybe we'll we'll, you know, get picked up again. So if we were bought our seafood from Thai or Vietnamese or Indonesian processors, would

Is that better? It's a good question. Very fair. I don't know. I don't. Well, I would. I'm guessing here, Jim, but my sense is maybe a little better because it's a little easier to engage with the companies in those countries and to force them to let you

do things differently, you know, to inspect and stuff like that. In China, it's like Saudi Arabia in that if you're going to be there, you're going to play by their rules. Like, and if not, they will kick you out. I mean, and so...

Indonesia and Thailand, and if you look at Thailand in particular, that's how I got my start, was cease slavery and issues in the New York Times in 2015. Thailand is a huge problem with forced labor, but they also respond to pressure. And the US government, the European government, and media applied massive pressure, and you saw changes. China is harder. Unless major players like Cisco and Walmart say, hey, we're going to pull out and move elsewhere, that actually...

gets noticed and things start changing. And a little bit of that began to happen. There were foreign ministry meetings that happened after the series landed in China and sort of hand-wringing about what to do about these disclosures, but not a whole lot.

So in the time we have left, we should probably talk about one of these other places, which is India and the subject of episode five. So tell us a story of how you came to investigate shrimp processing in India. And, you know, is that as big a problem or a similar kind of problem as in China? It's very similar. It's as big. My staff videographer, a guy named Ben Blankenship, and I were actually on a

ship in Southern Ocean near Antarctica working on another investigation. We got a note from a guy who said, I know about you guys because you guys just went up against this company. There was a bunch of meetings about your revelations and I was in the room. You didn't know I was in the room. I was counsel, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I have a lot of respect for you guys. I left that company. Now I work for this other company, American company, and I'm in India. And the stuff I'm seeing

turns my stomach and I want to blow the whistle. And I trust you to guide me on how I do that. You don't get that every day as a journalist, you know? And so I said, okay, well let's vet this guy. Who is he? I want a background check. I checked him. I began asking him all sorts of questions to see if, you know, I could just get a sense of his credibility. And as whistleblowers go and sources go, this guy was checking out over and over, got on the satellite phone with him. We were stuck on the ship for a while and,

And he was really impressive. He had documented everything. He had about 50,000 pages worth of documents he was ready to hand over, recorded meetings, security footage, and on and on and on. So I said, okay, Ben, we got to get off the ship. We got to get to India because we're going to lose this guy and he's looking to leave this job in two weeks. And we got to get there before he leaves the job or else we don't have the story. We need to get boots on the ground there. So we started begging the captain to let us off.

It was not going to be easy. He threw us a bone and said, look, I'll drop you off. There's only one commercial airstrip in Antarctica. I'll drop you off there, but you guys got to wing it and figure out how you get on that plane. Long story short, we got on the plane, end up back in Peru. My visa gets blocked because I'm a little bit more Google-able and not a friendly face to be having into your country. So India said, no, thanks. You can stay out.

Ben is not as known. And so they gave him a visa, which is great. So Ben goes, sits down with this whistleblower. This guy is, you know, longtime seafood industry exec. Nothing, you know, kind of no wiggle in his stories and his details whatsoever.

So off we went. The story ends up being about a shrimp processing plant. So shrimp is interesting. 2014, 2015, the AP, the New York Times broke and the Guardian broke huge stories about abuse in Thailand, mostly in the shrimp industry because then that's where shrimp was.

By 2017, a lot of Western brands, European, American, Canadian, pulled out of Thailand because they didn't want the bad press. They moved to India. Presently, a third of all shrimp eaten in the US comes out of India. It's from farms and it's processed in India. And we want to take a look at that. And this guy gave us such a window in on, it's the same story as in Thailand, debt bondage.

workers not allowed to leave, having to climb the wall or drill through a wall around the plant. But footage of women sneaking out of their dorms at night to try to escape, you know, just horrific stuff. As well as food safety concerns, huge use of antibiotics, which are banned. You can't be adding antibiotics into aquaculture fish that's shipped to the U.S. And yet,

um they these guys on their whatsapp um exchanges the officials from the plant were talking about how to get around inspectors how to get antibiotic positive shrimp you know onto the cargo ship etc so um that was just a chance to branch into a new realm but the same basic story of problems all right jim over to you for the exit question well i it's a fascinating and horrific problem um

And as you said, pressure sometimes works in certain countries. Like, I remember turtle extruder devices to save the turtles because those are what they call charismatic megafauna. Everyone loves a nice sea turtle. And it seems we like those a lot more than we worry about Uyghurs or Indonesians. And I don't know. I guess my last question is, where do you see this all going? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, look, it's one of those things where I don't think there's an arrival. There's no, like...

You don't win the war. It's ongoing. You just fight battles. And I think in this case, the battles we're fighting on our side is just to show it, explain it, and talk with experts who have ideas on how to fix it, and then do it again, just until you run out of juice. But I don't think we're ever going to fix this. Capital and industry are going to move...

to the next place. And probably there are those players, not all of them are going to find corners to cut, whether it's, you know, stealing stuff or dumping oil or using slaves. And we just kind of have to keep throwing light on it. There are fixes, you know, better supply chain tracking that really would force the industry because the white house tells Cisco and Cisco tells the fishing companies, Hey, look,

Games up. You got to start tracking the stuff like you would if it was on a truck or a plane or, you know, a train. You've got to track the stuff better so that we know exactly who worked it, where it came from and where that ship was. That's doable. It's just the industry hasn't been bullied into doing it. So I think that's probably the goal in terms of winning this battle. All right. Well, Ian Urbina, if people want to support the Outlaw Ocean Project, if they want to listen to your podcast, if they want to figure out what you're doing and follow you online,

where should they go? The OwlOcean.com is the website and there's a newsletter link there where you can put your email and then it's free and we alert you when something new has happened. All right. Well, thanks again for joining us again. You've been a fantastic repeat guest. You tell the best stories or the worst stories. All right. But we hope to have you on maybe next year when we hit season three. I'd love that. Thanks for having me, guys.

And as always, we do want to thank our sponsor, Bauer Group Asia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific. Bauer Group applies unmatched expertise and experience to help clients navigate the world's most complex and dynamic markets. Jim Caruso, my co-host, is a senior advisor with Bauer Group, and you can find them at bauergroupasia.com. Jim, what did you find especially fascinating this time as opposed to the previous time that we talked to Ian back in episode 10?

Well, what really struck me as we're talking to Ian is here we are so concerned with the safety of our food and where it comes from and traceability and organic and everything else. And here we have a situation where we eat huge amounts of shrimp in this country and calamari is on every menu I've seen lately. And it's all produced in China and Southeast Asia.

And yet, apparently, there's no concern about how it's produced or where it comes from. How do I know it's safe to eat? Well, or it's safe or it's not sort of tainted by, you know, all of these human rights abuses. It hasn't come on the blood of some poor Indonesian.

Exactly. We're very concerned that our Nikes are made in humane conditions in the factories there. And we're very concerned that the beef we import is wholesome and the animals are treated okay, not to mention our tuna fish. But somehow this seems to have slid into the radar. Yeah. And actually, I mean, what strikes me is I actually know very – I have very close friends and family who are –

pescatarian by choice. They only eat seafood and they do so not because of health reasons or because they believe that it is the most humane

of all of the kinds of meat that they could eat. They don't like the way the cows are treated or the pigs are treated. But seafood, I think in their minds, these are just fish that are being pulled up on a rod and reel or in a big net. And that's fine. They have really no idea of how the seafood actually gets to their plate. So you're trying to starve them.

I know. How many new vegans have been born today? Vegan support group. Exactly. Well, so that's all very depressing. Jim, do you have an uplifting story for me today or are you going to continue to depress me? Well, I'll let you decide. So in 2004 to 2007, I was posted in Thailand.

Thailand was exporting huge amounts of shrimp to the U.S. It was incredible. And the boss of my section, the economic counselor, decided it'd be really interesting to look into this. So he goes down to southern Thailand where they had these enormous shrimp producing areas. And he finds pretty much what Ian talked about.

laborers from southern Thailand who weren't getting paid, huge amounts of antibiotics, a disease in the shrimp, white spot disease or something, which they would process anyway. And I don't know if this is one reason that the industry moved to India, but for those of us, our countrymen who say State Department never does anything, well, we did something. So what did you do?

We wrote a cable. As you do. That is action, my friends. And a cable, for those of us who are not from the State Department world, essentially is? It is the message, a report that goes all over the U.S. government. We sent it all over the U.S. government because we knew this was prior departments of commerce, state, interior potentially,

Ag, of course. Anyway. Agriculture. It may have eventually done something, which in the world of diplomacy, incrementalism is what we do. It may have resulted in a stern demarche. Well, don't start with me, wild boy. Okay.

Well, somebody who's not stern is our producer, Ian Ellis Jones, and who runs IEJ Media and puts out our podcast. We thank him for that. Well, we certainly don't want to have to do it because we'd be no good at it. And we also want to thank him for all of the fantastic military and geopolitical graphics that he's been putting out, I think, with

Things going on currently in the Middle East. He probably isn't getting much sleep because there's probably a high demand for what's going on there. You can follow him and you really should if you're on X at Ian Ellis Jones. That's at Ian Ellis Jones.

Of course, if you enjoyed this episode, you should subscribe and follow right now. Stop what you're doing. Subscribe and follow. If you're in the car listening to us on your audio podcast, you should pull off in a safe space. Take out your phone, subscribe and follow to whatever podcast service, because it's really, really important, more important than whatever whatever meeting you're trying to get to right now.

You can also follow us on YouTube. Uh, if you want to see our pretty faces, that's youtube.com at IP podcast. Um, by the way, we are also on social media. That is, uh, X that is LinkedIn. That is blue sky. Who knows where it will be coming up soon. Uh, if you want to go back and listen to episode 10, we've referred to it as several times. That was how, why should we care about the outlaw ocean? Obviously more of the same with, with, with, uh, Ian Urbina. Uh,

along some different stories during that particular episode, we certainly encourage you to go back and listen to that one.

Finally, you can email us, as many of you are, indopacificpodcast at gmail.com. We are continuing to look at a lot of the emails we're getting for ideas for new guests. And, of course, we want to thank our sponsor, Bauer Group Asia. Certainly go and see them at bauergroupasia.com. For this time, for Jim and Ian and Jim's cat who's not there, this is Ray. Thank you for joining us on Why Should We Care About the Indo-Pacific.