Burmese Slaves Processed Fish for Export to ...?

Slavery and exploitation in the Thai fishing industry has been a growing problem for years. And it's not just a concern for the Thai, Burmese, Vietnamese, and other workers enslaved on fishing boats and in seafood processing factories -- it's an issue for every country that receives seafood exports from Thailand. As an exercise, I recently tried to track, via the Internet, what happened to a batch of fish processed by enslaved workers in Thailand.

First, I needed the name of a factory where human trafficking victims had been forced to process fish. It turns out that yesterday 54 Burmese workers were removed from a fish processing factory in Thailand, where they were being held as slaves. The factory was owned by the a mid-size dried fish producer -- J.D.P. Co. Ltd. I spent a couple hours scouring the Internet for any mention of J.D.P. Co. Ltd. and came up with a lot of Thai Yellow Pages entries and one promising entry which lists them as an exporter of not only dried, but frozen processed fish products. After that, my trail went cold. I was able to follow slave-processed fish out of Thailand, but have no idea where it went from there. To the U.S.? To a grocery store near me? The next time I walk past the fish sticks, will I be looking at a product made by slaves? Or will the slave-processed fish instead be bought by someone in London or Kyoto or Nairobi?

This turned out to be both an exercise in frustration and a valuable demonstration of how difficult it is to track global supply chains without insider information or contacts around the world. I think an exercise going the other direction (walking into a grocery store, grabbing a bag of fish sticks, and trying to trace its origin) would be equally difficult. The process by which what we eat and wear and buy and use actually gets to us is so complicated, we might be ten or fifteen degrees removed from the slaves who make our products.

It's possible that J.D.P. Company sold their processed fish directly to some American brand of fish sticks, and that I was really close to seeing where that slave-processed seafood ended up. But it's equally possible that they sold it to a small distributor who sold it to a large distributor who sold it to another processor who sold it to a conglomerate who packaged it as a subsidiary brand which was distributed to hundreds of different retail outlet. What a headache! Supply chains can be complicated, but they're often made more complex by a lack of corporate transparency. If Brand X Fish Sticks were more transparent about how and where its fish come from, it would be easier to track the supply chain and determine if any slavery is getting into your fish. Not easy, mind you. But easier.

Photo credit: joshberglund19