Thailand went on a charm offensive in defense of its prawn industry last week, seeking to convince Europeans that it is responding to allegations of slavery and torture in its fisheries sector.
The fishing industry accounts for 40 percent of Thai exports of food products and is a mainstay of the economy.
However, its image has been badly damaged by accounts of abuse of illegal immigrants held captive and forced into unpaid labor, sometimes on boats at sea for years on end without receiving any payment for their work.
Photo: AFP
Thailand pulled out the stops for the Salon International de l’alimentation food fair outside Paris last week, sending a delegation replete with officials from the labor and fisheries ministries, plus police and anti-human trafficking experts as well as industry leaders.
They then travelled on to Brussels to lobby EU officials.
“We don’t deny there is a problem,” Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs official Sarun Charoensuwan said at a special seminar on the subject. “A lot of concrete measures are on their way.”
According to a June article by the Guardian, there is a lot to be done by Thailand’s prawn industry, the world’s largest, which sends about a quarter of its exports to the US where they are known as shrimp, and 15 percent to Europe.
It found the sector relies heavily upon fish meal, which was often supplied by ships using slave labor, to raise the prawns.
The newspaper interviewed numerous escapees from ships, fishermen and ship captains who told of the trafficking of unsuspecting workers onto boats where they could end up being exploited for years. The workers had thought they were heading for factory or construction jobs in Thailand.
They recounted 20-hour days and regular beatings for even those who worked hard, as well as torture and execution-style killings.
A 2011 report by the International Organization for Migration found that laborers sold by traffickers to ship captains could end up spending years working on boats without pay or stepping on shore.
France’s Carrefour SA, the second-biggest retail group in the world, suspended its purchases of Thai prawns in June following the publication of the article in the Guardian.
Seeking to protect the key industry and its global reputation, Thailand intends to solve the problem by “bringing illegal migrants into the formal labor market,” according to Charoensuwan.
Military leaders who took power in a coup in May have launched a vast program to provide official papers to illegal immigrants.
Officials said that 1.4 million workers had been issued with papers, and that 50,000 of these work in the fishing industries.
However, hundreds of thousands more immigrants are estimated still to be working illegally.
A new law requires managers of fishing companies to provide labor contracts and to respect minimum levels of pay and time off. They are also banned from employing youngsters under 15 years old.
Late last year, 178 companies in the Thai fisheries sector signed a charter of good practice, under the aegis of the government and the International Labour Organization.
One of the signatories was Charoen Pokphand Foods PCL, which used to supply international supermarket giants Wal-Mart Stores Inc of the US, Carrefour of France and British group Tesco PLC.
Activists are not satisfied with the results.
“We were brought in for briefings, but we are really disappointed by the program,” said Andy Hall, a British labor rights activist who wrote a report alleging exploitation of workers in the Thai agriculture industry, for which he risks a prison term.
He said workers and trade unions had been excluded from training conducted under the government-industry program.
“Nothing on the ground has changed,” he said.
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