Escaped slaves, who still fear for their safety, tell of spending years on fishing boats with little or no pay, while being abused, tortured and even killed for trying to fight back.
“They kept me chained up, they didn’t care about me or give me any food,” Vuthy tells Kate Hodal and Chris Kelly from The Guardian in a report to be broadcast on tonight’s Dateline at 9.30pm on SBS ONE.
The former monk from Cambodia hadn’t seen land for over 18 months after being trafficked onto one of the boats, and was only freed thanks to a local charity paying around $800 for him.
“He kept me outside in the wind and rain. All the workers were the same as me,” he says. “We were treated like animals, but we’re not animals, we’re human beings.”
Half a million tonnes of prawns are exported from Thailand every year and the country is the world’s largest supplier of the seafood.
Official Thai figures estimate there are up to 300,000 people working in the Thai fishing industry. Most of them are migrants and only a fraction are registered.
Each year thousands pay brokers large sums of money to smuggle them into the country in search of a better life, reportedly with the knowledge of corrupt police and border officials.
“The broker told me how much I would get if I worked in Thailand. It was an easy job, he said,” explains Aung Myo, who left Myanmar to help provide for his five siblings, but ended up being forced onto a fishing boat.
“The captain kept on torturing him and yelling and beating him,” he says of one incident on board. “At last he gave him electric shocks… the guy couldn’t even stand, and then he shot him and threw him into the sea.”
Other fishermen described workers committing suicide to escape the harsh conditions at sea.
The Guardian spent six months tracing the complex food chain from these Thai trawlers to the shelves of major supermarkets around the world.
Any inedible and infant fish caught by the boats, known as trashfish, is taken by cargo ships back to shore, where factories turned it into fishmeal.
That fishmeal then becomes part of the fish feed supplied to Thailand’s prawn farms, including Thai-owned Charoen Pokphand (CP) Foods.
The company is the world’s largest prawn farmer and supplies leading supermarkets worldwide, including Coles and Woolworths in Australia - and they have plans to expand their presence here.
Retailer Konfir Kabo entered a partnership with the Thai company to open up 1000WAT Modern Thai restaurant in Melbourne a few months ago.
He recently returned from visiting the company's facilities abroad and says he's satisfied it's committed to thoroughly investigating allegations against it.
“We condemn any form of slavery, and we would not be providing any product that is linked to any form of slavery,” he told SBS.
“[CP Foods are] working with the Thai government, the NGOs, they’re even making sure all their supply chains are certified to make sure that all of the products are properly identified,” he added.
CP Foods says that it’s extremely concerned by the findings of the investigation and has “immediately initiated an investigation into every step of our supply chain”.
“Pending the outcome of these investigations, we have suspended purchasing product for our shrimp feed business from all suppliers except those offering internationally certified, 100% by-product based fishmeal, for which we are able to verify the entire supply chain of all ingredients,” it says in statement.
“It is important to remember that CP Foods is a producer of farmed shrimp and shrimp feed, we have never been an operator of any fishing vessel,” the company adds.
Coles issued a statement to Dateline saying: “Our ethical sourcing policy requires the provision of a third party ethical audit to deliver evidence of satisfactory working conditions… CP Foods has advised us of additional measures they have introduced to eliminate the likelihood of forced labour in their supply chains… We will continue to closely monitor the situation and take immediate action if required.”
“Woolworths purchases some prawn products from CP Foods in Vietnam but none in Thailand,” a spokesperson told Dateline in a statement.
“We have held discussions with CP Foods leadership and understand they have mid to long term comprehensive strategy to ensure that through their entire supply chain they stamp out the use of slave labour. We will continue to work with all our suppliers to end practices like the use of slave labour that are clearly unacceptable.”
Mark Zirnsak, spokesperson for the Uniting Church in Australia on social justice issues, has been monitoring human rights abuses in Thailand's fishing industry for several years.
He believes CP Foods could be doing more to ensure it isn't buying from fishing vessels with links to human rights abuses.
"CP has made a number of very positive statements,” he said.
“We have concerns though about the level of transparency they've been willing to provide about the measures they are taking and we've certainly requested that they meet that people we work with in Bangkok, and as of yet that hasn't happened."
Norman Grant, of the Seafood Importers Association of Australasia, says allegations of poor treatment by the operators of some fishing boats in Thailand aren’t new, but he doesn’t think Australian consumers should be concerned that the food they’re eating is linked.
"I think it's an extremely long bow to draw,” he said.
“Most of the production of shrimp, for instance, comes from farms and factories, that's where most of the labour input is. By far the most labour input comes from that, and be absolutely assured that there's no slave labour involved in that aspect of it."
The Thai Government also says that combatting human trafficking is a top national priority.
