Alleged mistreatment of migrant fishery workers and non-reporting of daily catches could lead to punishing U.S. and EU sanctions. But the issue is not Taiwan’s alone to solve.

As Taiwan and the U.S. continue to engage in trade talks under the U.S.-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade, fishing industry issues could snag negotiations. The treatment of migrant fishery workers has come to the fore after the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) placed Taiwanese seafood products on the List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor for the second time in September last year. Failure to rectify this matter wouldn’t only drag down bilateral relations but could also threaten lucrative supply chain contracts. 

While “forced labor” allegations are the latest international charge leveled against Taiwan’s fishing industry, they follow a listing by the EU of Taiwan as an uncooperative nation in the fight against illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) catch and bycatch. The listing ultimately resulted in a “yellow card” warning in 2015.  

The EU said Taiwan’s fishing industry had been uncooperative in implementing catch verification reporting and lacked oversight of distant water fishing operations. Furthermore, weak sanctions and lack of compliance with regional fisheries management raised concerns that much of Taiwan’s catch and bycatch was illegal. 

Taiwan was removed from the EU’s list in 2019 after it introduced measures such as pushing legislation of three deep-ocean fishery laws, improving surveillance and control systems of deep-sea fisheries, and launching a 24/7 fishing boat surveillance center.  

Taiwanese seafood products were first put on the DOL list in 2020, despite being in the clear with the EU. The reprimand followed Greenpeace’s publication Seabound: The Journey to Modern Slavery on the High Seas. It was a black eye for a nation billed as a beacon of democracy, human rights, and economic development.  

Consequences for remaining on the list include exclusion from lucrative overseas supply chains, and the potential economic losses have spurred the government to take action. But while some progress has been made to improve conditions aboard Taiwanese distant-water fishing vessels – including a wage increase for migrant crew members and the hiring of more inspectors to carry out labor checks – these are unlikely to eliminate the wider problem, which is more complicated than it might seem at first glance. 

Mistreatment aboard 

Fishing vessels travel to distant waters in chase of migratory pelagic fish like tuna, skipjack, and albacore, which forage in the open ocean. Tuna’s international popularity has led to a spike in demand and prices, while the latter two species make up the bulk of shelf-stable canned products.  

With fishery workers spending longer spells at sea, Taiwanese vessels have become almost entirely dependent on migrant workers who accept lower wages and endure physically demanding work. Filipino and Indonesian workers make up the bulk of crews, with language barriers and isolation from friends and family further compounding the grueling work. 

“Currently, most positions aboard a fishing vessel, aside from the captain and bosun (officer), are staffed by migrant workers,” says Lennon Wong of Serve the People Association (SPA), a Taiwanese NGO. He adds that a typical distant-water vessel would have up to 30 migrant workers aboard. 

Joe Henley, author of Migrante, a fictionalized account of Filipino fishery workers aboard Taiwanese vessels, has familiarized himself with many outdated laws governing the industry in Taiwan. As an example of such laws, Henley notes that any death aboard a distant-water fishing fleet may be handled with a funeral at sea or by simply tossing the deceased fisherman overboard.  

This was the fate of one Filipino aboard the Taiwan-owned, Vanuatu-flagged Da Wang. Compounding the situation were allegations that the worker died at the hands of an abusive captain. A witness to the alleged abuse is fellow crew member Jaka (alias), who tried to report the matter when the ship made a port call in Fiji. 

“I was physically abused on the boat, and so was my shipmate who died,” says Jaka. “Witnessing it was traumatizing. When we docked in Fiji, we tried to pursue the case, but the police did not agree to arrest the captain. It was painful that we couldn’t get justice for our friend, and for us, we continued to experience rampant physical abuse aboard the ship.” 

Despite the threat of jailing as a result of the incident, Jaka says the captain’s attitude did not change. “Our captain was still physically abusive,” he says. “We would only get three hours of sleep and then another three hours, and then five hours of sleep.” 

Originally from Cagayan Valley in Northern Luzon, Philippines, Jaka has for the past 10 years been working aboard Taiwanese vessels like Da Wang. He says the captain would become irate whenever the catch was insufficient or when a fishing line broke.  

Jaka also describes the fate of a migrant fisherman who suffered a stroke while at sea that left half his body paralyzed. Without medical assistance, it was up to his fellow shipmates to care for him, a task that included daily feeding. Despite pleas from the crew, the captain refused to make an emergency port call, and the employee was asked to continue working in his limited capacity.  

“We were treated like animals,” says Jaka. “Because of our hard labor, we need to eat a lot, but we were never full. We brought this up to the captain, but it fell on deaf ears. When the ship docked in Kaohsiung, I told the captain, ‘I am going back to the Philippines.’ When I told him this, he was unhappy, and I had to stay in their accommodation and wait 14 days for a flight, and I couldn’t even leave to [buy] medicine for my asthma.” 

London-based Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) began reporting on forced labor and human rights violations aboard Taiwanese ships six years ago. “They have a very bad record of compliance,” says Chiu Shao-chi, manager at EJF East Asia. “We tackle issues such as human rights and the environment because we believe they are very closely related.”. 

Chiu admits mistreatment aboard vessels seems to come with the job, as fishing is tough, dangerous, dirty work. “No one wants to work aboard fishing vessels,” he says. “It is all migrant workers aboard Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese boats.” Language barriers can lead to misunderstandings, and a lack of grievance mechanisms permeate the industry, he adds. 

Complicating matters is the recruitment process, where agents act as middlemen facilitating cross-border transactions. For the Taiwanese fleet, Indonesian field agents work in small villages and partner offices in Jakarta. Anyone could exploit crew members by confiscating their documents, as the recruitment process is opaque. 

In fact, most migrant workers pay a security guarantee of anywhere between US$800-1,200,  which is taken from their pay and only returned if they fulfill a three-year contract. Agents can also disappear, leaving some workers with no recourses to recover their security guarantee.  

For many migrant workers, a sort of debt bondage exists. “We want to ban security deposits, but we don’t do enough due diligence to stop unscrupulous brokers,” says Chiu. 

“Distant water vessels don’t have much oversight,” says Wong of SPA. “Taiwan tries to show they are improving the situation of migrant fishery workers by raising the minimum wage from US$450 a month to 550 a month. But migrant fishery workers aboard distant water vessels are still not subject to local labor laws and don’t receive the same pay as migrant fishery workers on local fishing vessels.”   

To improve conditions for migrant fishery workers, Wong suggests including the workers in current labor laws, developing a complaint mechanism for fishery workers, and making Wi-Fi freely available on vessels. 

Wong estimates that just 10% of vessels offer Wi-Fi to migrant fishery workers, allowing them to remain in regular contact with friends and family. Internet connectivity can also enable instantaneous reporting of abuse and, subsequently, immediate intervention. Captains are reticent to make Wi-Fi available, wary of expensive emergency port calls.  

International collaboration needed  

Taiwan was in the past slow in responding to complaints related to mistreatment of migrant fishery workers. Local authorities claimed difficulty in regulating ships in foreign waters, some of which conduct much of their operations through cargo transshipment and refuel at sea or in foreign ports. A number of vessels also fly flags of convenience (FOC, a business practice in which a merchant ship is registered in a country other than that of the ship’s owners), meaning that some vessels operated by Taiwanese companies are not subject to Taiwanese labor laws. 

The reasoning by Taiwanese authorities is not baseless – an array of complicated, international factors makes it impossible for one nation alone to monitor its distant-water fishing industry. In fact, the nature of distant-water fishing makes it one of the first truly “international” industries.  

Ships may be flagged to a certain country despite only returning to that country once a year, mostly conducting fishing operations in open waters or Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) of other nations. Transshipment of cargo or fuel can also be conducted at sea or other international ports without the flagged country’s knowledge. 

Most distant-water fishing vessels pursue pelagic fish like tuna, which migrates between distant waters, further complicating regulation. “The most abundant tuna is found in remote areas around the Marshall Islands, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu,” says Mina Huang, a researcher at the Environment & Animal Society Taiwan (EAST).  

“Each of these countries may charge daily rates for purse seiners to operate within their 200-nautical mile EEZ,” Huang adds. Aside from Taiwan, few countries around the world have fishing companies wealthy enough to afford the privilege of such fishing within another country’s EEZ.” Taiwan has the world’s second-largest fishing fleet, with approximately 1,100 distant water tuna longliners, about 40 purse seiners, and 200 squid jiggers.  

Monitoring or managing such fisheries requires multinational cooperation and international agreements to follow catch guidelines ensuring ecological balance. For Taiwan, which is excluded from most international organizations, this is a difficult feat. 

“The largest and most technically complex fishing vessels are purse seiners, which are so large they travel with a helicopter on board, and a three to five vessel array to deploy fishery aggregation devices (FAD), which tuna and skipjack like to hide under in the open sea,” says Huang.   

Fortunately, the operation of such purse seiners is highly regulated and monitored with an onboard observer tallying daily catches and noting all transshipments. “For example, if a ship wants to do transshipment of cargo, they have to notify authorities three days in advance,” says Huang. “However, many can go undetected as ships can turn off their GPS monitors when they make the necessary close contact with one another.”   

The fishery industry is highly secretive, Huang adds. “For example, in APAC discussions, China does not want to discuss the number of vessels or location as such information continues to be quite opaque.” Apart from lack of transparency, there is also the issue of illegal fishing, which is estimated to account for 15% of annual catches, according to the European Commission.  

Still, more government oversight and a stick-and-carrot approach could correct some of the wrongs in Taiwan’s fishing industry. EJF’s Chiu says her group’s research shows Taiwan’s long-distance fishing operations would go out of business without tax exemptions, fuel subsidies, and other perks such as government funding of monitoring systems.   

Chiu adds that the fishing industry has demonstrated that, when pushed, it can be nimble and responsive to change. For example, sailing a squid jigger from Taiwan to prime fishing grounds off the coast of Argentina would cost NT$10 million in fuel alone and take two months. Companies sometimes save on salary costs by flying migrant workers into ports closer to the catch location.  

Instead of simply passing the buck to governments to protect the ocean, EAST’s Huang says consumers also need to call for greater transparency in the supply chain. Information such as where a product was caught, legality, and use of forced labor should all be answered and made easily available to consumers. 

More information can ensure greater transparency, traceability, regulation, enforcement, and observation, notes Huang. Additionally, landing declarations can protect the ocean’s bounty and ensure future generations can also enjoy seafood.   

While this certainly isn’t Taiwan’s problem to solve alone, it has the technology and resources to make real change and better manage the world’s shared fishing resources, ensuring greater resilience and sustainability of global fisheries.