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“All I did was tell my captain I couldn’t take it anymore, that I wanted to go home,” said Kyaw Naing, his dark eyes pleading into an Associated Press video camera sneaked in by a sympathetic worker. “The next time we docked,” he said nervously out of earshot of a nearby guard, “I was locked up.”
Here, in the Indonesian island village of Benjina and the surrounding waters, hundreds of trapped men represent one of the most desperate links criss-crossing between companies and countries in the seafood industry. This intricate web of connections separates the fish we eat from the men who catch it, and obscures a brutal truth: Your seafood may come from slaves.
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Associated Press
Are Slaves Catching the Seafood You Buy? investigates the disturbing seafood industry in Indonesia. Main takeaways: these people are being tortured and there’s no way to distinguish seafood caught by slaves from other seafood for sale in America.
Much like the factory farm industry in the US, the Indonesian seafood industry preys upon migrant labor and violates workers’ basic human rights. Once again, animal rights issues and human rights issues are intertwined.