A Fleet Prone to Captive Labor and Plunder

China has expanded an armada of far-flung fishing vessels. And this has come at a grave human toll.

I come to you today with a body of reporting that is truly unique. 

Over the past 4 years, The Outlaw Ocean Project investigated a wide variety of human rights and environmental concerns associated with the world’s seafood supply chains. Our attention centered on China because it is the lynchpin for the global market in this critically important foodstuff. This investigation, much of it reported at sea and on the ground in China, is unlike anything we've done before both in terms of the power of its findings and the global reach of its impact and publishing plan.

At sea, we boarded Chinese ships as part of the effort to document cases of debt bondage, wage withholding, excessive working hours, beatings of deckhands, passport confiscation, the denial of timely access to medical care, and deaths from violence on hundreds of Chinese fishing ships. 

On land, we got eyes into seafood processing plants to uncover for the first time that Uyghurs, members of one of China’s largest and most oppressed ethnic minorities, are being forcibly transferred across the country by the government to work in the seafood industry.