Turkson, who heads the Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development, says working in the fishing industry is one of the most perilous jobs in the world.

And, each year 32,000 people lose their lives working in the fishing industry, Turkson said in a message for World Fisheries Day.

Turkson's message calls on Governments and International Organizations to implement the law and ensure fishermen and their rights are protected.

The Catholic Church in New Zealand outreaches to fishers and their families through the Apostleship of the Sea.

It is no stranger to cases of abuse and precarious working conditions, false contracts and even slavery that takes place in fishing.

Fr Jeff Drane, the National Director of the Apostleship of the Sea in New Zealand supports Turkson's call.

Drane confirmed the dangerous nature of the work and that fishers' arriving in New Zealand ports are exploited.

"The New Zealand Government has passed legislation (the Fisheries Act - Foreign Vessels and other Matters - amendments May 2016) to control foreign vessels when in our territorial waters but our ocean is so huge it's hard to police," he said.

Drane says that it is only when the fishing vessels are inshore that it is possible to notice a dangerous work environment and exploitation.

However, he says there is no absolutely effective way of tracking abuse or exploitation either close or far from shore.

Seafarers transport more than 95% of the food and goods the world uses every day, and yet these 1.3 million hardworking men and women are often forgotten.

Away from family and friends for many months at a time, working long hours and navigating some of the world's most dangerous stretches of ocean, seafaring can be a tough, lonely and hazardous career.

The Apostleship of the Sea, internationally also known as Stella Maris, promotes the spiritual and social welfare of seafarers irrespective of nationality or belief.

Sources

• ICN
• Supplied

Workers are promised good wages but many are at sea for months or years working long hours, earning 15 New Zealand cents an hour. Continue reading

Some indentured workers have even been locked in cages.

Figures released by the New Zealand Customs Service under the Official Information Act show seafood giant Thai Union has been a consistent exporter to New Zealand.

More than 620,000kg of product - breaded and frozen shrimp, fish fillets, canned tuna and salmon, surimi and material for pet food - entering the country last year.

A Pulitzer Prize for public service reporting went to the Associated Press for its landmark expose of the Thai fishing industry.

The slave-tainted seafood was tracked through to end-consumers, and many products were found to run through Thai Union networks and subsidiaries.

Pulitzer judges said the series had "freed 2000 slaves, brought perpetrators to justice and inspired reforms".

Foodstuffs, encompassing Pak'n Save and New World supermarkets, did not directly answer questions on whether it stocked Thai Union product on shelves or in house-brand products.

Instead, a spokeswoman stressed its role in efforts to clean up the sector: "We recognise that there are inherent problems associated with working with the Thai fishing industry."

Rival operator Progressive Enterprises, which runs Countdown and Woolworths stores, said none of its stock came from either of the Thai Union sites identified by the Associated Press as slave labour camps.

However a spokeswoman said Progressive sourced some material from the company: "Select canned tuna and canned salmon are manufactured at two Thai Union factories, however these factories have been independently audited to ensure they are adhering to our ethical and quality standards. No issues with child labour have been raised as part of those audits."

Pet food maker Mars said the issue of slave labour was alarming. "The practice is deplorable and goes against everything Mars stands for."

Mars which sells New Zealand brands Whiskas and Iams catfood, has been named in a class action lawsuit in the United States for failing to disclose forced labour in its supply chains, and is supplied by Thai Union.

Nestle, makers of Purina pet food, said it imported some finished products for sale in New Zealand from Thai Union, but significant progress had been made to "prevent unacceptable practices and human right abuse in the seafood supply chain".

Source

• nzherald.co.nz
• radionz.co.nz
• Image: thedogsnobs.files.wordpress.com

Like the hundreds of thousands of his fellow Cambodians who migrate in search of work each year, he had a simple but powerful motivation: "I heard there were better jobs in Thailand and I knew bahts were worth more than riels, so I decided to go."

It was a decision that nearly cost him his life. After chatting with others in his village who had made the journey before him, San waited at the border for two days. When night fell on the second day, he crossed the border into Thailand and then waited another day on the other side. Eventually, a group of men appeared in a large pick-up.

"They used their mobile phones as torches to see which of us looked strong, then they laid us next to each other and on top of each other in the back of the pick-up," says San.

"There were three layers of us, with the strongest at the bottom. There were about 20 of us in the back and they put a plastic sheet over us and told us not to make any noise."

Eight suffocating hours later, the pick-up stopped in a forest and San and five other Cambodians were herded into a cage and "locked in so that the police wouldn't find us". Behind bars in an unknown forest in a strange land, the negotiations began. San and the others were offered $200 (£132) a month - far more than they would make at home - to work on construction sites in Bangkok.

They accepted, only to discover that they would have to pay their captors-cum-employers $80 for transporting them to the Thai capital, $80 for the correct documents, and $30 a month for basics such as mosquito nets. Continue reading

Sources

• The Guardian. The article is by Sam Jones, a Guardian reporter currently on a secondment on Global development.
• Image: YouTube

Seven months later, his body was sent home in a wooden coffin: jet black from having been kept in a fish freezer aboard a ship for more than a month, missing an eye and his pancreas, and covered in cuts and bruises, which an autopsy report later concluded had been inflicted before death.

"Sick and resting," said a note taped to his body. Handwritten in Chinese by the ship's captain, it stated only that Mr. Andrade, 31, had fallen ill in his sleep.

Mr. Andrade, who died in February 2011, and nearly a dozen other men in his village had been recruited by an illegal "manning agency," tricked with false promises of double the actual wages and then sent to an apartment in Singapore, where they were locked up for weeks, according to interviews and affidavits taken by local prosecutors.

While they waited to be deployed to Taiwanese tuna ships, several said, a gatekeeper demanded sex from them for assignments at sea.

Once aboard, the men endured 20-hour workdays and brutal beatings, only to return home unpaid and deeply in debt from thousands of dollars in upfront costs, prosecutors say.

Thousands of maritime employment agencies around the world provide a vital service, supplying crew members for ships, from small trawlers to giant container carriers, and handling everything from paychecks to plane tickets.

While many companies operate responsibly, over all the industry, which has drawn little attention, is poorly regulated.

The few rules on the books do not even apply to fishing ships, where the worst abuses tend to happen, and enforcement is lax.

Illegal agencies operate with even greater impunity, sending men to ships notorious for poor safety and labor records; instructing them to travel on tourist or transit visas, which exempt them from the protections of many labor and anti-trafficking laws; and disavowing them if they are denied pay, injured, killed, abandoned or arrested at sea. Continue reading

Sources

• The New York Times, from an article by New York Times reporter Ian Urbina.
• Image: Nick Grono

So profitable is the trade in slaves that some local fishermen in Thailand have been converting their boats to carry Rohingya migrants instead of fish.

A Guardian investigation into Thailand's export-orientated seafood business and the vast transnational trafficking syndicates that had, until recently, been holding thousands of Rohingya migrants captive in jungle camps, has exposed strong and lucrative links between the two.

Testimony from survivors, brokers and human rights groups indicate that hundreds of Rohingya men were sold from the network of trafficking camps recently discovered in southern Thailand.

According to those sold from the camps on to the boats, this was frequently done with the knowledge and complicity of some Thai state officials.

In some cases, Rohingya migrants held in immigration detention centres in Thailand were taken by staff to brokers and then sold on to Thai fishing boats.

Other Rohingya migrants say Thai officials collected them from human traffickers when they arrived on the country's shores and transported them to jungle camps where they were held to ransom or sold to fishing boats as slave labour.

Thailand's seafood industry is worth an estimated $7.3bn a year. The vast majority of its produce is exported.

Last year, another Guardian investigation tracked the supply chain of prawns produced with slave labour to British and American supermarket chains.

Though the Guardian has not irrefutably linked individual Thai ships using Rohingya slaves to specific seafood supermarket produce, the likelihood is that some seafood produced using this labour will have ended up on western shelves.

The scale of the profitable and sophisticated human trafficking networks making money from the desperation of hundreds of thousands of stateless Rohingya "boat people" has been emerging over the past weeks. Continue reading

Sources

• Emanuel Stoakes is a freelance journalist and researcher in the field of human rights and conflict; Chris Kelly is a documentary filmmaker and photographer; Annie Kelly writes on global development, human rights and social affairs for the Guardian and Observer. This article is from The Guardian
• Image: BBC News
• See also: Thai fishing industry turns to trafficking video, and 'Murder at Sea: Captured on Video but Murderers Go Free' in The New York Times

Away from family and friends for many months at a time, working long hours and navigating some of the world's most dangerous stretches of ocean, seafaring can be a tough, lonely and hazardous career.

Piracy, shipwreck, abandonment and separation from loved ones are just a few of the problems that seafarers and fishers cope with.

Fishers are involved in what is recognised as the most dangerous occupation in the world.

Seafarers transport 90 to 95% of the food and goods the world uses every day, and yet these 1.3 million hardworking men and women who face danger every day are often forgotten.

When aircraft crash we hear about it on the news; when ships sink, unless it's a cruise liner like the Costa Concordia, it's almost as if no one cares.

Shipwrecks and Piracy

Wikipedia lists 67 ships as ‘sunk, foundered, grounded or otherwise lost' in 2012. Twenty-five of those shipwrecks resulted in the loss of at least 943 lives, and probably many more.

Seafarers are constantly threatened by pirates. Between January and 23 May this year, there were 106 incidents reported of ships being attacked, including four hijackings and Somali pirates were holding 71 hostages and 5 vessels.

During 2012 297 ships were attacked by pirates, 174 were boarded, 28 were hijacked and 28 were fired upon. The number of people taken hostage onboard was 585 and a further 26 were kidnapped for ransom in Nigeria. Six crew members were killed and 32 were injured or assaulted. (Information from http://www.icc-ccs.org/)

Stella Maris — an official Ministry of the Church

Under the guidance and protection of Mary, Star of the Sea, the Apostleship of the Sea (AoS) cares for the fishers and seafarers that visit our ports.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, AoS ministers to those who work at sea and in our ports in Auckland, Wellington, Tauranga Moana and Napier. It is in the process opening or re-opening branches in other NZ ports. Continue reading

Sources

• Marist Messenger
• Image: Apostleship of the Sea GB

The Jakarta Post carried the story of the 32 Indonesian fishermen who deserted the South Korean deep-sea trawler Oyang 75 in Christchurch in June 2011.

Dr. Ani Kartikasari who was the Christchurch Indonesian Society president at the time describes how she found the 32 men shivering in a church. "They were very cold, most wearing cotton jackets," she said.

"The heaters on the walls were on but their faces could not hide the exhaustion and fatigue from the previous sleepless night when they discussed their plight together."

They have been hailed as heroes. "Their actions have cleared the path for other crews to follow and exposed the wrongs so many have suffered," said the Rev. Jolyon White, social justice enabler for the Anglican Church.

His assessment was echoed by Christchurch Indonesian Society president "Nonie" Elyana Thenu and her predecessor, Ani Kartikasari. "They are brave men, heroes," they said. "What they've done has made a difference."

Source

• The Jakarta Post
• Image: The Jakarta Post

We believe that God and his principles in the first pages of his Bible must get the place of honour where the ecological debate takes place. It's a hot item that touches the whole world very emotionally. It's our mission to bring God's Words to the attention of the policymakers. 50 years ago, the Council Fathers emphasized the fact that "the greater man's power becomes, the farther his responsibility extends", and that every human activity is to correspond, according to the design and will of God, to humanity's true good."(C.S.D. 457) What are God's Biblical principles in his call to fishermen for responsible fishing? In this article, we attempt to put together some Biblical considerations.

The call for ecological awareness

"If we continue like this, there will be disasters on our planet." Such words seem to come from the last book of the Bible. But not the angels blow the trumpets of the apocalypse. It is the climatologists and ecologists. Now, after the onset of globalization, the fishermen face an environmental challenge. Consumers and international fishery factories heard the call of nature lovers. The demand for ecological awareness in dealing with all creation, and in particular in dealing with sustainable food harvesting from the sea, is becoming urgent. The older generations in fishery consider environmental problems as naturally occurring defects of nature, grossly exaggerated by the media. Younger fishermen look at it differently.They ask: what's going on? It seems as though nature does not regulate itself anymore. "Man is the culprit", one calls. In the old days we could harvest, pick, fish and feast without restriction. Nature was no concern. Now it seems that nature is out of balance, and that nature has come to depend upon our help. Continue reading

Sources

• Fr Dirk Demaeght, Apostleship of the Sea, Belgium International Christian Maritime Association
• Image: Scoop