While forced labor, a form of modern slavery, in the world’s fishing fleet has been widely documented, its extent remains unknown. No methods previously existed for remotely identifying individual fishing vessels potentially engaged in these abuses on a global scale. By combining expertise from human rights practitioners and satellite vessel monitoring data, scientists have showed in an recent study that vessels reported to use forced labor behave in systematically different ways from other vessels. Scientists used machine learning to identify high-risk vessels from among 16,000 industrial longliner, squid jigger, and trawler fishing vessels.
The study concluded that 14% and 26% of vessels were high-risk. It also revealed patterns of where these vessels fished and which ports they visited. Between 57,000 and 100,000 individuals worked on these vessels, many of whom may have been forced labor victims. This information provides unprecedented opportunities for novel interventions to combat this humanitarian tragedy….
The study found, inter alia, that longliners and trawlers using forced labor travel further from port and shore, fish more hours per day than other vessels, and have fewer voyages and longer voyage durations… Taiwanese longliners, Chinese squid jiggers, and Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean longliners are consistently the five fisheries with the largest number of unique high-risk vessels. This pattern is consistent with reports on the abuses seen within distant water fleets that receive little legal oversight and often use marginalized migrant workers .
Excerpts from Gavin G. McDonald et, al, Satellites can reveal global extent of forced labor in the world’s fishing fleet, Dec. 21, 2020