Satellites can reveal global extent of forced labor in the world’s fishing fleet

Abstract

While forced labor 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, we show that vessels reported to use forced labor behave in systematically different ways from other vessels. We exploit this insight by using machine learning to identify high-risk vessels from among 16,000 industrial longliner, squid jigger, and trawler fishing vessels. Our model reveals that between 14% and 26% of vessels were high-risk, and also reveals 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. More broadly, this research demonstrates a proof of concept for using remote sensing to detect forced labor abuses.

Fish crimes in the global oceans

“…Transshipment offenses commonly involve reefer vessels; hence, in 65% of the cases, they do not co-occur with other illegal fishing–related offenses. However, we find here that in 25% of the cases, illegal transshipment is linked to human rights and labor abuse offenses, including through keeping workers longer at sea and preventing them from escaping poor working conditions and/or filing complaints when reaching nearshore or harbors ( 60 – 63 ). Nearly 20% of transshipment offenses were linked to illegal fishing offenses, by accepting or transshipping illegally caught fish.…”

The Need for Social Considerations in SDG 14

“…In this article, we are focusing on Regional Fisheries Management Organization (RFMOs), which have mandates to manage fisheries at the high seas. A study by McDonald et al (2020) showed that the risk of forced labor is neither solely linked to exclusive economic zones (EEZs) nor high seas, but occurs globally. Moreover, one of the key areas of focus for RFMOs is the problem of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing that has often been linked to forced work and labor abuse on fishing vessels (Marschke and Vandergeest, 2016).…”

The politics of pixels: A review and agenda for critical remote sensing

“…Since then, civil society has pursued activities formerly monopolized by the state, like crisis monitoring (Herscher, 2014; Rothe and Shim, 2018). Satellite activism has also detected activities ranging from the razing of Rohingya villages in Myanmar (Human Rights Watch, 2017) to the destruction of mosques in Xinjiang (Ruser et al, 2020) and forced labor in the global fishing fleet (McDonald et al, 2021). As cautioned in Section III, however, the convergence of advocacy and surveillance may be problematic, with NGOs effectively operating as “intelligence agencies” (Aday and Livingston 2009).…”