Sweatshops On The High Seas
China's role in our seafood supply chain
Perhaps the world is taking more notice, perhaps it’s the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon at play: after writing last week’s issue, I started seeing more reports about the weaponisation of food and the continuing deterioration of food security in a handful of nations.
Early this week, two U.N. food agencies issued their latest Hunger Hotspots report, identifying populations in Sudan, Palestine, South Sudan, Haiti and Mali as facing immediate risk of starvation.
They also said hunger levels have worsened in eight others, including my home country, Myanmar. The report provides an early warning for June - October and calls for urgent humanitarian action in these 13 countries to save lives.
Two days later, the Global Investigative Journalism Network published a new chapter on how to investigate hunger in war zones.
I hope these resources will lead to more attention on what’s going on, a true denunciation of the perpetrators, and more support to the populations needing help.
If you want to talk more about food systems in person, I’ll be in Tanzania next week to attend the ANH 2025. If you’re there or are attending the same conference, give me a shout.
Two-thirds of the world’s surface is covered by water. If you think that’s a lot, chew on this other statistic.
Roughly two-thirds of this vast body of water lies outside any single country’s jurisdiction, according to the World Resources Institute.
It is teeming with life and natural resources, ranging from organisms we know about - and consume - to those we can only imagine in our wildest dreams. It can also be a dystopian space where a lack of laws combined with the wilderness and remoteness can lead to the kind of abuses that are mostly kept in check on land.
Ian Urbina set up The Outlaw Ocean Project, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit investigative outfit, to shed light on the weird, the wonderful, and the wrongdoings that occur in these waters, which are far from the reach of most law enforcement.
I’ve spoken to Ian before: about illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing for a podcast and the misconduct uncovered at a shrimp processing plant in India for Thin Ink.
So when I found that CBC Podcasts is releasing Season Two of The Outlaw Ocean, a podcast based on some of the investigations Ian and his team have done over the past few years, we had another chat focusing on a key story arc of this season: the scale of China’s involvement in our seafood, together with the state of ocean conservation and journalism in the age of AI.
If you, like me, are a lover of calamari, this could be a wild ride. So hold tight.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
THIN: Ian, for the uninitiated, can you explain China's role in our seafood?
IAN: It’s best to think of seafood as a product like Nike shoes or iPhones or the t-shirt you wear. It's just a product that happens to come from a far off place, and that place is pretty distinct. And then, okay, who are the players who most control that product globally? Well, the control happens in two realms: on the water and on land.
On the water: what are the metrics of measuring who controls most boats? Who's got the most boats that are really focused on industrial scale fishing? Not the small boats that go out for a day for two miles from shore but high seas fishing to an industrial scale. No one compares to China. So the distant water fishing fleet is this fleet that we're talking about.
The Chinese government estimates that fleet size is 2,700 vessels. Some think tanks put it up around 17,000 and the number we came to was around 6,500. If you even just take the Chinese conservative number, it’s five times bigger than the next largest fleet. So they are colossally bigger than everyone else combined.
On the water, they're the biggest. They go the farthest. They pull the largest tonnage out of the water.
Now let's move to land. On land, China is also the biggest when it comes to the processing capacity.
It's so big that they are not just handling everything they catch, but much of what's caught by the French, Canadians, the US, gets sent to China, frozen. Or what’s caught on a US ship maybe even in the U.S. water, is frozen, sent to China, processed there, frozen again, and sent back.
That means everything goes through China, or the vast majority of what's consumed in the West, Europe, Canada, US, goes through China.
It's not just the biggest and most important in both realms. It's also the most opaque. It's hardest to see, and therefore people can't say very much in an informed way, because no one really knows.
THIN: Where does the squid connection come from?
IAN: We were like, “Okay, which of the vessels that seem to travel the furthest seem to have the longest stints at sea, and are most dependent on foreign labour, which is usually a risk indicator of forced labour and abuse?”
And the squid fleet, more than the tuna fleet, the fish meal fleet, or other kinds of fleet, immediately jumped out. The squid vessels tend to travel in big packs of two to three hundred ships. They stay at sea sometimes for two, two and a half years.
Pre-COVID, they were using largely Indonesian crew, with Chinese officers. The ships are really, really dirty. The work is really grinding.
It's also producing a product that everyone knows: calamari, right? A hugely popular product that we're all tied to. So we said, okay, let's focus on that, let's get on the water and see if we can get on these vessels.
Over the course of four years, we went to high seas Galapagos, high seas Falkland Islands, the coast of West Africa, and the sea border with North Korea. These are four places on the planet where large clusters of Chinese squid vessels every year traverse. And to see if we can talk our way on board and see what the conditions are like, etc.
THIN: I didn't realise that they travel in packs of 200 or 300. That's a lot.
IAN: Yeah, it's huge and it's not exactly coordinated. You know, no one is needing to go only when the other guys go. But everyone knows when the squid are moving and they get a lot of important, helpful data from the Chinese government and universities as to, “Hey, biomass is now shifting over here”, and they all move at the same time.
THIN: Is China’s role in squid production something that has always been there, or is that something that had expanded recently?
IAN: So the mid 80s is when the modern Chinese distant water fleet emerged. There was the Qing Dynasty period when the Chinese also ruled the seas. But then there was this insular turn where it became illegal for Chinese vessels (to do that) for all sorts of complicated historical reasons.
Then in the mid 80s the Chinese decided they kind of wanted to grow their empire, power, and food security. So they began sending more vessels out to the coast of Africa, etc. In those same years, the other players were the Soviet Union, Spain, and Japan. In subsequent years between 1986 and 2025, everyone, those countries included, began reducing their fleets massively, and China began growing its fleet.
The other thing that happened again in the late 80s, early 90s, was China became the factory of the world.
Squid processing in particular is really labour intensive and dirty and slow. So the wealthy Global North countries said we don't want to do this work anymore, ship it to China, and China just grew, grew, grew in its processing capacit. That's how they've become the superpower of seafood.
THIN: Now, when you were talking about squid ships being sort of like dirty and all of that, you had a very, very vivid description of being on that ship. In the podcast, you described it as like being in the inside of someone's nose! I don't think I will ever see calamari in the same way ever again.
IAN: (Laughs) I’m sorry. I ruin a lot of people's eating habits, I must confess.
THIN: After seeing all of that, do you still eat calamari?
IAN: I'm officially a vegetarian since I was in college. On the other hand, truth be told, I love shrimp and calamari and pork, and I'm not always compliant with my so-called vegetarianism. I don't have many weaknesses, but calamari is one of them. I just love it. So yes, once in a while, I still eat it. And, you know, I don't think about the inside.
In a three-episode arc that focused on China, Ian took us through the flagrant human rights abuses committed on these ships and onshore. In his words, some of the conditions sounded Dickensian.
These included a desperately ill and ill-treated Indonesian deckhand who was dumped off Montevideo, Uruguay’s coastal capital, and the forced labour of some of the most vulnerable and persecuted people on earth: Uyghurs and North Koreans who endure terrible working conditions in factories located on land.
One statistic he cited was particularly shocking to me: In Montevideo, they see a corpse every six weeks from mostly-Chinese fishing vessels who were leaving their deceased workers behind.
THIN: Can consumers do anything to change any of that? Is there any leverage besides just stopping the consumption of seafood?
IAN: Yeah, for sure. I think the first thing for an average person like you or me as a consumer is to not think of ourselves just as a consumer. You and I are taxpayers, we have parents, we have friends, we have kids, we have people we talk to. We're interlocutors, we're taxpayers, we're donors. Yes, we are buyers, but we are a lot of things.
We're often journalists and storytellers. So I think, like in the many different hats we all wear, you can stack up small choices that do have an impact. For example, a little donation to some organisation that's really hammering this issue once a year, a conversation with a friend of yours about something you read that really moved you, and you know, spreading the word.
All that stuff I really do think has an impact, not in some kind of silver bullet fashion, but just in some sort of crescendo of butterfly effect.
THIN: You guys spent a lot of time and used lots of different methods to get access to those boats. (To the readers: listen to the podcast to know more.) Why is it so important to actually be on the boat and speak to them instead of maybe finding other ways of communicating, like, perhaps using new technology?
IAN: My theory on how we think is that we are very moved by narrative. Like, you can write an article, not a story, and you can stack facts, and someone who's interested will read them and digest them. It will not impact them the same way as a story with a character that has a beginning, middle and end, and a sense of vicarious experience in the level of five sense detail that you give in a narrative, right?
And those stories just like grab people that don't really feel the ethics or politics of the issue, but they're like fascinated by the story. So that's one point.
If you're going to just write the thing, going out there and being able to talk… like you're the fourth person in two weeks who's cited the inside the nose thing. I would not have thought of that unless I had slipped on the mucus that was the floor on those ships. I mean, literally, I thought like, where am I?
If I had tried to write the story having never been on those vessels, I wouldn't have known that the walls ooze. So I think you see things that you can't imagine if you do phone call journalism. I think also video, in this day and age, the Instagram moment we live in, our peers are so visual, and the ability to capture visual footage… it moves the meter on people's conscience.
THIN: Yeah’s that true, and good to remember with so much talk around changes in journalism and storytelling due to artificial intelligence. I think that narrative stuff you mentioned is something that you have to be there to experience. AI can’t do it for you.
IAN: Well, a huge part of the investigation was the on-land portion which was the revelation of state sponsored forced labour in two categories, Uyghurs from Xinjiang and North Koreans, both working in these factories.
There is no way we could have proven that without help from some level of AI, by going through thousands of hours of footage that have been publicly posted on Douyin, the Chinese TikTok, and then honing in on images and video of average folk filming themselves in factories and that's an account of a Uyghur. So then we go back in time and see that Uyghur’s transfer.
That takes algorithmic help to do on the scale that we did it. So I totally agree that you need the first hand stuff, but the coded things that are happening now can also be used for good, for our journalism.
I agree, we don't want the robot anywhere near the actual writing. But the hunting, like using the robot to hunt information and then vetting what they bring back to you, that I think is really useful.
Now, there are huge issues of water and electrical use and all the environmental consequences, and we've been having meetings about it. Are there ways to minimise that, by using certain kinds of AI and not others?
THIN: Your focus has been on the lawlessness of the ocean realm. Have you been following the discussions on the High Seas Treaty, which mostly covers the protection of marine resources and was adopted two year ago? What do you think of it, even though it doesn’t cover human rights issues? (Detailed explainer here, and a Thin Ink issue about the negotiations here.)
IAN: I think it's a great thing. It's a very slow moving beast, but it's kind of mind boggling to think that the two thirds that make up the high seas don't really have a method for protection. So if you wanted to create a marine protected area on the high seas, who do you have to ask for permission, who polices it, and what are the consequences for those who break it?
Not to mention, what if someone discovers like an oil well underneath it? Who gets to profit from it? All these questions are really worthy questions… and that's what the treaty is for.
Obviously, the devil's in the details, like, how much third world nations have to pay, how much say they have if Big Pharma discovers the cure for COVID in some sponge off the coast of Ghana. Does Ghana get a piece of the action from the multibillion (find)?
THIN: Let’s go back to the podcast. The stories are based on the investigations you’ve done, like the one on shrimp in India, which I’ve interviewed you about. So I’m interested, as someone who also does long-term investigations, in your thought process on turning them into podcasts. Is it to find a new audience, people who don't read? Or is it to re-up and hammer away the big themes?
IAN: It's mostly the former, tapping into new audience that we probably didn't touch when we ran it with NBC News, you know?
I think one of the things that motivated me to leave the New York Times - I loved The Times and this is not a critique of The Times per se - but I think the old model legacy print outlets has of this rigid, self-defeating outlook on exclusivity and preciousness of “Well, that ran”… Right, but 1% of the planet read it and it's the elite 1% who are already converted, if we're really honest.
So why would we not be trying to find ways to translate it into 10 languages and to get it onto Spotify? Because more people, especially in the places where we pulled the story from, need to be seeing it too.
So podcast is just another play, and oddly, I underestimated how many people listen to podcasts. Like the response we get from our journalism via the podcast is often bigger than when we run with the New York Times or The New Yorker.
THIN: What would you like the audience to go away with after listening to the second season of Outlaw Ocean?
IAN: It's a riveting and urgent universe out there, the offshore realm. More than 50 million people working there and the public and the decision makers should focus a lot more on it, for understanding the problems, but also potential solutions that we can't find on land. That’s point one.
Point two, journalism plays a huge role in that, and it's unusually expensive. So, you know, consume it, get behind it, and share it. That helps support it.
Thin’s Pickings
Corporate concentration and power matter for agency in food systems - Science/Food Policy
This paper by seven authors, including Jennifer Clapp, argued that “increased corporate concentration and power in food systems has the capacity to undermine people’s agency” and called for more policy attention on this important issue.
They pointed out three ways in which this happens: dominant firms within concentrated food systems can exercise market power in a way that is detrimental to ordinary people, they can shape important conditions like the kind of technologies used, and their access to the corridors of political power can influence food policy and governance processes.
No Person Shall Keep Roosters - Offrange (formerly Ambrook Research)
Melissa Hart’s heartfelt piece is thought provoking, beautifully written, and highlights the difficulties faced by people who want to do the right thing in the kind of food system we are living in.
Feeding the Future: Why Hollywood Food Storytelling Needs a Climate-Scale Revolution - Green Queen
My colleague Tessa Pang’s reflections after attending the Hollywood Climate Summit. She found that food storytelling still lags behind climate storytelling and is stuck in the “eat less meat” montage. She has some ideas on how to overcome it.
How a Tiny Middleman Could Access Two-Factor Login Codes From Tech Giants - Bloomberg
This important piece by my colleagues Crofton Black and Gabriel Geiger with Bloomberg’s Ryan Gallagher isn’t about food or climate. But two-factor authentication is such a big part of our electronic lives these days that I think it should be read and shared widely.
An industry whistleblower provided the journalists with data revealing how an obscure Swiss outfit named Fink Telecom Services that has been accused of infiltrating private online accounts is handling this service for companies such as “Google, Meta and Amazon.com, several European banks, popular apps such as Tinder and Snapchat, the cryptocurrency exchange Binance and encrypted chat platforms Signal and WhatsApp”.
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