Night of the Iguana: Old Fogies with young Thai Nubiles. Do they mix?

[pinkpanther99]

The video which features in the article I linked in an earlier has now been put on the Guardian YouTube channel.

If you've not already done so, I suggest you watch it.

It is truly harrowing stuff.

Thai fishing industry turns to trafficking: 'We witnessed girls being raped again and again'

A Guardian investigation has linked Thailand's fishing industry with the vast transnational trafficking syndicates profiting from the misery of some of the most persecuted people on Earth.

[spidermike007]

People have to eat.

Fortunately, that makes me less guilty regarding this issue as I don't eat seafood.

I do use a computer. What about child slavery on your expensive mobile phones, clothes and electronics?

It's easier to stop using electronics, but no one on this forum will do it and instead bash Thailand.

Put your money where your mouth is.

Does anybody have any idea what this guy is asking? What about child slavery on your expensive mobile phones? Are you suggesting that Apple and Samsung used kidnapped slaves in their factories? Do you have anything whatsoever to back up such a wild and bizarre suggestion? Anything?

[anon7867763]

People have to eat.

Fortunately, that makes me less guilty regarding this issue as I don't eat seafood.

I do use a computer. What about child slavery on your expensive mobile phones, clothes and electronics?

It's easier to stop using electronics, but no one on this forum will do it and instead bash Thailand.

Put your money where your mouth is.

Does anybody have any idea what this guy is asking? What about child slavery on your expensive mobile phones? Are you suggesting that Apple and Samsung used kidnapped slaves in their factories? Do you have anything whatsoever to back up such a wild and bizarre suggestion? Anything?

Lot´s of exploitation but I haven´t seen any proof of slavery as in the SE asian fishing industry

[Thongkorn]

My wife's father got killed at sea, He worked out of Sahmut Sahkon, he said This practise of slavery and killings had been going on for years , the Thai government know about and do little to stop this, mainly because of corruption , If you speak out you just fall overboard or have a fatal accident at sea.

[JakeSully]

Ok we know who the enslavers are. Who are the slaves besides Rohinyas?

Are there any others?

[phuketandsee]

Land Of Slavery

[spidermike007]

Ok we know who the enslavers are. Who are the slaves besides Rohinyas?

Are there any others?

Under the tinny roof of Songkhla’s commercial port, on Thailand’s south-east coast, the imperial-blue cargo boat that brought Myint Thein back to shore is unloading its catch, barrel by barrel. The day’s international fish trading has just begun, and buyers are milling about in bright yellow rubber boots, running slimy scales between their fingers, as hobbling cats nibble at the fishbones and guts strewn across the pavement.

Myint Thein doesn’t have much time to talk, so he tells us the basics. He paid a middleman two years ago to smuggle him across the border into Thailand and find him a job in a factory. After an arduous journey travelling through dense jungle, over bumpy roads and across rough waves, Myint Thein finally arrived in Kantang, a Thai port on its western, Andaman coast, where he discovered he’d been sold to a boat captain. “When I realised what had happened, I told them I wanted to go back,” he says hurriedly. “But they wouldn’t let me go. When I tried to escape, they beat me and smashed all my teeth.”

For the next 20 months, Myint Thein and three other Burmese men who were also sold to the boat trawled international waters, catching anything from squid and tuna to “trash fish”, also known as bycatch – inedible or infant species of fish later ground into fishmeal for Thailand’s multibillion-dollar farmed prawn industry. The supply chain runs from the slaves through the fishmeal to the prawns to UK and US retailers. The product of Myint Thein’s penniless labour might well have ended up on your dinner plate.

Thai 'trash fish' workers unload the catch at Songkhla port. Chris Kelly/Guardian

Despite public promises to clean up the industry, many Thai officials not only turn a blind eye to abuse, the Guardian found, they are often complicit in it, from local police through to high-ranking politicians and members of the judiciary – meaning that slaves often have nowhere to turn when they have the opportunity to run.

“One day I was stopped by the police and asked if I had a work permit,” says Ei Ei Lwin, 29, a Burmese migrant who was detained on the docks at Songkhla port. “They wanted a 10,000 baht (£180) bribe to release me. I didn’t have it, and I didn’t know anyone else who would, so they took me to a secluded area, handed me over to a broker, and sent me to work on a trawler.”

Brokers

Thailand produces roughly 4.2m tonnes of seafood every year, 90% of which is destined for export, official figures show. The US, UK and EU are prime buyers of this seafood – with Americans buying half of all Thailand’s seafood exports and the UK alone consuming nearly 7% of all Thailand’s prawn exports.

“The use of trafficked labour is systematic in the Thai fishing industry,” says Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, who describes a “predatory relationship” between these migrant workers and the captains who buy them.

“The industry would have a hard time operating in its current form without it.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a high-ranking broker explained to the Guardian how Thai boat owners phone him directly with their “order”: the quantity of men they need and the amount they’re willing to pay for them.

“Each guy costs about 25,000-35,000 baht [£450-£640] – we go find them,” explains the goateed broker, who operates out of the industrial fishing and prawn-processing hub of Samut Sakhon, just south of the capital, Bangkok.

“The boat owner finds the way to pay and then that debt goes to the labourers.”

At various points along the way, checkpoints are passed and officials bribed – with Thai border police often playing an integral role.

“Police and brokers – the way I see it – we’re business partners,” explains the broker, who claims to have trafficked thousands of migrants into Thailand over the past five years. “We have officers working on both sides of the Thai-Burmese border. If I can afford the bribe, I let the cop sit in the car and we take the main road.

“This is a big chain,” he adds. “You have to understand: everyone’s profiting from it. These are powerful people with powerful positions – politicians.”

The price captains pay for these men is a extremely low even by historical standards. According to the anti-trafficking activist Kevin Bales, slaves cost 95% less than they did at the height of the 19th-century slave trade – meaning that they are not regarded as investments for important cash crops such as cotton or sugar, as they were historically, but as disposable commodities.

For the migrants who believed Thailand would bring them opportunity, the reality of being sent out to sea is devastating.

“They told me I was going to work in a pineapple factory,” recalls Kyaw, a broad-shouldered 21-year-old from rural Burma. “But when I saw the boats, I realised I’d been sold … I was so depressed, I wanted to die.”

Chained

Life on a 15-metre trawler is brutal, violent and unpredictable. Many of the slaves interviewed by the Guardian recalled being fed just a plate of rice a day. Men would take fitful naps in sleeping quarters so cramped they would crawl to enter them, before being summoned back out to trawl fish at any hour. Those who were too ill to work were thrown overboard, some interviewees reported, while others said they were beaten if they so much as took a lavatory break.

Many of these slave ships stay out at sea for years at a time, trading slaves from one boat to another and being serviced by cargo boats, which travel out from Thai ports towards international borders to pick up the slave boats’ catch and drop off supplies.

The vessels catch fish and shellfish for domestic and international markets, including roughly 350,000 tonnes of trash fish, every year, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). This trash fish is separated at sea and ferried back on cargo boats to shore, where it is ground down and turned into fishmeal for multinational companies such as CP Foods, which use it in animal feed for prawn, pig and chicken farming.

CP in turn supplies food retailers and giant international supermarkets including Walmart, Tesco, Carrefour, Costco, Morrisons, the Co-operative and Iceland, with frozen and fresh prawns, and ready-made meals.

Another article:

Winston Salem Journal profiles The Ghost Fleet

Greg Kwedar

April 21, 2015

Elizabeth O'Connell/OtherWords | Posted: Sunday, April 19, 2015 5:00 pm

A few years ago, a friend promised Asorasak Thama a job in the Thai fishing industry. The job offered good pay for a few weeks of work.

Instead, he wound up trapped at sea for a year, working in terrible conditions for no pay at all. Thama had become a slave.

Authorities rescued Thama and his crewmembers when they stopped the boat he was trapped on for fishing illegally in Indonesian waters. A few years later, however — after a stranger drugged him at a bar in southern Thailand — Thama found himself enslaved again.

When his boat came into shore to get a fishing license from Malaysia, he waited until the captain had had a few drinks, then punched him and fled.

Despite these terrible ordeals, Thama is one of the lucky ones — he escaped. Filmmaker Shannon Service will share Thama’s ordeal and long road back home in an upcoming documentary called “The Ghost Fleet.”

There’s no official data on how many men are enslaved on fishing boats in Thailand. The Thai government estimates that up to 300,000 people work in its fishing industry, 90 percent of whom are migrants — and therefore vulnerable to being duped, trafficked and exploited.

These workers come to Thailand in hopes of earning money to support their families back home. But while they fill a major labor shortage in the country, they don’t enjoy the same protections as Thai workers, such as freedom of movement and association.

Migrants rely on a complex and murky network of brokers to help them find jobs — for a fee. The brokers sometimes lure workers with false promises of factory jobs, but instead sell them to ship captains as laborers.

Many wind up working in debt­bondage to pay off transport and work­permit fees. If the men are paid at all, it’s often much less than they’d been promised.

And the conditions are awful. Fishermen have reported working 20 hours or more at a stretch. The boats can stay at sea for years, since captains are reluctant to risk losing their workers by bringing them ashore.

Some captains give workers methamphetamines to keep them going, The Guardian reported last year. They survive on bits of fish they catch that cannot be sold.

Many die at sea. Some drown attempting to escape, while others are thrown overboard when they’re too sick to work.

It gets worse. A yearlong investigation by The Associated Press recently revealed dozens of fishermen held in cages on an island called Benjina in Indonesia. Some hadn’t communicated with their families for 10 years.

In all, it turned out, hundreds of other men were stranded on this island. Dozens lay buried in a crude graveyard nearby, roughly 3,000 miles from home.

The AP tracked the fish caught by the captives on Benjina to a Thai harbor, where it was then sent to various distribution points. From there it wound up with wholesalers like Stavis, which sells packaged fish that can make its way to supermarket shelves in the United States.

The AP followed the slave­caught fish to another distributor called Thai Union, which in turn sells to Wal­Mart, as well as to popular pet food brands like Fancy Feast, Meow Mix and Iams.

What can you do?

By speaking out against companies profiting from exploitation — and choosing to buy more responsibly sourced products — consumers can change corporate practices. They’ve proved it in the past with other products, from chocolate made from child labor to tuna caught by nets that kill dolphins.

Asorasak Thama made it home, and the men on Benjina are on their way, too. But hundreds of thousands of others aren’t so lucky. It’s time for governments, companies and consumers to stop turning a blind eye to slavery in the seafood sector.

Elizabeth O’Connell is Green America’s campaigns director.

GreenAmerica.org

Edited July 22, 2015 by spidermike007

[AlQaholic]

I would liken this to what the Nazis did in the concentration camps.

[JakeSully]

I would liken this to what the Nazis did in the concentration camps.

Would explain why you can see flags of the 3rd reich everywhere for sale.