Illegal fishing by massive Chinese fleet costs South American countries 8% to 15% of their catch

[Judi Lynn]

2. Thousands of ocean fishing boats could be using forced labor - we used AI and satellite data to find

AI·6 min read

Thousands of ocean fishing boats could be using forced labor – we used AI and satellite data to find them

21 December 2020



Fishing on the high seas is a bit of a mystery, economically speaking. These areas of open ocean beyond the territorial jurisdiction of any nation are generally considered high-effort, low-payoff fishing grounds, yet fishers continue to work in them anyway.

I am an environmental data scientist who leverages data and analytical techniques to answer critical questions about natural resource management. Back in 2018, my colleagues at the Environmental Market Solutions Lab found that high-seas fishing often appears to be an almost entirely unprofitable endeavor. This is true even when taking government subsidies into consideration.

Yet fishers continue to harvest on the high seas in staggering numbers, suggesting that this activity is being financially supported beyond just government subsidies.

Forced labor is a known problem in open ocean fishing, but the scale has been very hard to track historically. This mystery – why so many vessels are fishing the high seas if it isn’t profitable – got our team thinking that maybe many of these vessels are, in a sense, being subsidized through low labor costs. These costs could even be zero if the vessels were using forced labor.

By combining our team’s data science expertise with satellite monitoring, input from human rights practitioners and machine learning algorithms, we developed a way to predict if a fishing vessel was at high risk of using forced labor. Our study shows that up to 100,000 individuals may have been victims of forced labor between 2012 and 2018 on these ships.

Long trips, long hours and traveling long distances are all signs that a vessel is using forced labor.

More:
https://techandsciencepost.com/news/tech/computerscience/ai/thousands-of-ocean-fishing-boats-could-be-using-forced-labor-we-used-ai-and-satellite-data-to-find-them/

I believe this has been happening far longer than has been known in the West. There was an incident which happened in the late 1970's, when a Chinese sailor was discovered living outdoors in South America. They found an interpreter who asked him how he was homeless and he said that his ship went off and left him. He explained he had been taking armadillos to eat as food, describing them as "the little pigs nobody wanted."

My mother was overwrought with sorrow for this man, and when I found out I was unable to forget it, too. I could easily see how a ship would abandon him if it was trying to avoid being found with conscripted laborers on board!