Thank you.
My name is Ian Urbina. I'm the director of The Outlaw Ocean Project. We're a journalism organization based in Washington D.C.
I spent two decades at The New York Times, on the investigative unit. The last big investigation I conducted there looked at human rights and environmental crimes on the watery two-thirds of the planet.
After leaving the Times, I created my own shop, if you will. We're a team of 12. We're decentralized, and we do deep-dive investigative projects. We're always reporting at sea and on the fishing vessels, if fishing is the target.
The last four years were spent specifically looking at the Chinese distant-water fishing fleet, which are vessels in foreign waters or high seas. We focused on China in particular. It's of great relevance to Canada in particular, because China is the superpower of seafood by two metrics. One is the number and tonnage pull of vessels on the water around the world. China has more distant-water fishing vessels than the next largest fleet by a factor of 10.
The second reason it's the superpower of seafood is its processing capacity. Fish pulled out of Canadian waters by Canadian flag vessels, out of U.S. waters by U.S. flag vessels—or French, German or Spanish, etc.—are often landed in the home country and then frozen, shipped to China for processing, frozen again and shipped back.
China, for both of those reasons, is really the bottleneck of the global seafood supply chain, so the crimes, be they IUU fishing or human rights on land in processing plants, are of great concern to the rest of the world, including Canada.
What our investigation found was a global fleet that is China, and a processing infrastructure that is, especially, in Shandong province in China, that has myriad deep concerns.
On the fishing vessels themselves, we found widespread problems of IUU. These came in various categories. AIS darkness is when vessels go invisible or go “dark” by turning off their transponders for long periods of time—often weeks and months—which is a violation of Chinese law and other rules. We also see the ramming of other ships; Chinese vessels' incursions into foreign waters—Argentinian waters or West African waters, where they're not licensed—using gear they're not permitted to use; and human trafficking on the vessels. We see high-grading, which is the dumping of fish when they can catch more fish, and fishing in zones where they're not permitted. There is a wide variety of IUU-related crimes by this fleet. There are also severe human rights abuses on the vessels themselves.
On land, we also found things that cause very deep concern, and we continue to report that. There is widespread use of Xinjiang Uyghur labour—state-sponsored forced labour—in processing infrastructure. One of the largest companies that's bringing a lot of seafood into the west is a company based in Canada. It's one of many companies that we found to be importing seafood from processing plants that have widespread use of banned labour—either North Korean state-sponsored forced labour or Xinjiang Uyghur forced labour.
The bottom line is that there's a huge problem and it gets back to import controls, supply chain tracing and a willingness of companies, be they Canadian, American or any others, to reckon with whether they can actually keep track of the conditions on the vessels or in the processing plants. These are the core concerns that the industry and government players are going to have to confront.
I was just in Ottawa a week ago, meeting with folks in your foreign affairs office about some concerns about laws on the books for import controls and the ability under existing law for Canada to stop the import of certain seafood that's been tied to IUU or human rights, but there's a lack of political will and a lack of experience in using those laws. There's growing pressure, I think, partially because of this investigation and the work of others—Morley and Oceana included—to really draw attention to some of these concerns.
One final thing I would mention is that I think there needs to be a reckoning within the IUU and marine community with some of the issues that Oceana just raised and that our investigation has been raising for a while. This is the redefinition of illegal fishing. If we're going to talk about IUU and not actually take into account concerns about sea slavery and human rights concerns in the processing infrastructure, we're going to end up having to solve a problem twice.
If we have a bifurcated, siloed method of tackling IUU that doesn't include the human conditions, these same concerns within the seafood supply chain are going to come up again in a separate form, so I would encourage you folks to actually look at the definition of IUU and really think hard, as the U.S. is already doing, about incorporating new components in that definition.
I'll end it there. Thank you.