Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Urbina reveals the tragic link between shark fishing and human trafficking.
Luke Tipple is joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the Outlaw Ocean Ian Urbina, who has dedicated his life to chronicling crime on the high seas. They discuss the state of our world’s oceans, how nearly 20% of your seafood was likely caught illegally, and the surprising link between modern slavery and the killing of sharks.
Find episode transcripts here: https://shark-weeks-daily-bite.simplecast.com/episodes/s4-ep2-how-shark-fishing-funds-human-trafficking-ian-urbina
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:13:04 Speaker 1 Today we take a deep dive into the link between shark fishing and human trafficking and stick around to the end for our shark bite as we reveal just how important the ocean is to your daily life. In fact, you wouldn't be alive without it.
00:00:13:06 - 00:00:20:06
Unknown
During an interview last week podcast.
00:00:20:08 - 00:00:23:22
Speaker 1
Why
00:00:23:22 - 00:00:32:21
Speaker 1
Did you know that almost one out of five fish that you can buy at the supermarket right now or even your nearby market is poached illegally?
00:00:32:23 - 00:00:56:06
Speaker 1
One out of five. That's 20% of the illegal fishing trade is worth over $20 billion every year, which makes it the sixth largest crime network in the whole world. I mean, it's up there with the drug trade and human trafficking. And while there are plenty of laws and government interest in stopping this from happening, there is shockingly little enforcement.
00:00:56:08 - 00:01:26:04
Speaker 1
Now, if you were to imagine some spaghetti Western movie where the local sheriff has lost all control over the nearby gang, except it's not some little dusty mining town, but it's the entire ocean You'd be starting to get the idea. Now, of course, the ocean has always been a haven for criminality. That's nothing new. It's a vast place where slaves and deckhands toil on boats with little potable water, rat infested corridors and bugs everywhere.
00:01:26:06 - 00:01:52:07
Speaker 1
And where insubordination against your officers could mean anything from getting beaten or perhaps even getting killed. But the fact that it's still that bad and I'm not talking about ancient history is alarming. In short, the ocean has a massive crime problem. And what's more, dead sharks numbering in the millions are helping fund it. With me today is Ian Urbina.
00:01:52:11 - 00:02:17:18
Speaker 1
He's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and founder of the Outlaw Ocean Project. It's a nonprofit dedicated to exposing the environmental and human rights abuses occurring right now on our international waters. For more than a decade, he's amassed thousands of hours of interviews doing it himself on the boats in these conditions, getting a firsthand account of what's happening in this world that few of us know anything about.
00:02:17:20 - 00:02:38:20
Speaker 1
We're talking to him about the state of the ocean, the crime that runs rampant in it, the resulting devastating loss of life, and the sharks that help fund much of it. And hopefully we're learning what we can do about it. Ian, I want to thank you for your time and joining us on Shark Week, the podcast. Welcome. Your book is in your book and your podcast.
00:02:38:20 - 00:03:02:02
Speaker 1
I've been diving into these in the last few days here and it's it's heavy stuff, really heavy stuff. And the work that you've done yourself into inserting yourself into some of the, you know, potentially quite dangerous situations is is really impressive. Could you define for me, I mean, if one in five fish is being poached or fished illegally, who is doing the fishing and under what conditions as.
00:03:02:02 - 00:03:24:12
Speaker 3
You think of that water? Two thirds of the planet. It's best to kind of split it up just to wrap your head around it. So in terms of the people out there, you know, more than 50 million people work at sea. You can think of some of them work in the merchant marine carrying, you know, cargo, oil and grain and Nike shoes.
00:03:24:14 - 00:03:46:00
Speaker 3
Probably about 2 million. Then the other huge portion are working in fishing. And then within the fishing realm, you've got nearshore. Those are it's a mostly male profession guys that are going out a day, a week and coming back. And then you have the distant water fishing vessels. And those are the ones that go to the high seas and they stay out sometimes for two or three years on a tour.
00:03:46:02 - 00:04:05:04
Speaker 3
And so the really darkest stuff happening, the highest levels of criminality with illegal fishing, but also of sea slavery and other really serious concerns are in the distant water fishing fleet. Those vessels that stay out for a long time and for obvious reasons, in the end of the day, if you're going to use traffic labor, you're going to shark fin or you're going to steal fish from another country's waters.
00:04:05:04 - 00:04:12:05
Speaker 3
It's all a cost saving tactic. Those are all corner cutting to try to like, you know, make make ends meet.
00:04:12:07 - 00:04:33:15
Speaker 1
That's frankly shocking that they'd be able to stay out that long. I mean, that that must just be a cesspit just floating around in the middle of the ocean, especially with no suppliers. Your book and your work talks a lot about sea slavery. Could you define what sort of modern day slavery in this context is? Because I think it invokes a number of different things to different people.
00:04:33:19 - 00:04:41:06
Speaker 1
And from what I was saying, even with some background of this, what I was watching of your work really surprised me.
00:04:41:08 - 00:05:14:03
Speaker 3
Yeah. I mean, I think it's really smart to always define what you mean by a heavy, freighted historical term like slavery. So when I use it, I mean a spectrum of captive labor. And the spectrum on one end might have, you know, actual crew that are shackled when they're not working. And that's rare. But it happens. And we put, you know, documented cases that were verified by governments on the front page of The New York Times so that that happens, but not frequently all the way over across the spectrum are subtler forms of forms of captivity.
00:05:14:03 - 00:05:31:19
Speaker 3
So debt bondage, you know, a Cambodian guy who's dirt poor in an inland village has no way to make any money to feed his family, might meet a guy. He's a Thai guy's. Hey, look, you want to get a job in construction? The Cambodian guy says, Sure, but I don't have any money to get across the border. I don't have papers.
00:05:31:19 - 00:05:55:17
Speaker 3
Don't worry about it. Will set off. Get in the truck. And three weeks later, he's not ending up at the construction site. He's ending up on a at a dock and he gets march onto the vessel. The costs incurred by the guy who trafficked him, who carried him across the border, the payoffs to the border guards, etc. All that debt is now a debt bond and the trafficker sells the guy to the captain and says, look, I incurred 400 bucks to get this guy here.
00:05:55:23 - 00:06:17:00
Speaker 3
Now he's yours. You pay me 400 bucks. So now the captain owns the guy that's debt bondage, right? And the captain owns the guy for six months of work before that debt is removed. And that's a fairly common practice. Debt bondage. It's illegal in most of the West and widely viewed as fairly unethical. But it's a fairly pervasive norm in and decent water fishing.
00:06:17:06 - 00:06:36:22
Speaker 3
So it's a range. And then also the the captivity is just a geography. If you're if you're working in a factory and the factory is out in space a thousand miles from Earth, you don't have the option to get out. Right. You have no way of leaving. Well, that's the same thing as a decent water fishing vessel. Even if you want to leave, you got a captain Say, Hey, look, I don't want to be doing the same way.
00:06:36:22 - 00:06:39:12
Speaker 3
I want to go home. You're not going anywhere.
00:06:39:14 - 00:06:54:06
Speaker 1
You are. You say that a lot of these ships where this is a pervasive problem are going offshore for a long, long time. And largely because the fish stocks have collapsed. How many of these boats are going after sharks, specifically?
00:06:54:08 - 00:07:21:14
Speaker 3
You know, sharks and shark targeting and shark finning is a fascinating topic. And one kind of interesting thing that I found along the way was how shark fins are used as a way to subsidize slave wages. So on a lot of vessels, especially tuna long liners, the they're not actually officially targeting sharks, but they are clearly targeting them.
00:07:21:14 - 00:07:48:04
Speaker 3
And the other thing that's interesting from an economic perspective is the workers on these vessels are typically paid below a livable wage, to put it mildly. But there's often a sometimes written in contracts, but usually spoken deal where if they catch shark, the fins are collective eyes between the crew. They put them in a bag, dry them out, and then when they get to shore, those guys, those crew are allowed to sell them to supplement their wages.
00:07:48:04 - 00:08:08:17
Speaker 3
And the captain, the officers allow that. And it's sort of a it's an incentive, A, for the crew to not raise a stink because they're engaged in illegal activity, because they're now very engaged. You know, it's their extra and B, to keep the guys motivated to fish that much harder because they're hoping they can get the bonus by landing a shark and then they get to put it in the pool and they can make decent money.
00:08:08:17 - 00:08:14:12
Speaker 3
I mean, not huge, but, you know, they can pump up their wage by 10% by this little hidden subsidy.
00:08:14:14 - 00:08:20:00
Speaker 1
Well, and I'd have to assume that they're not keeping the rest of the shark. Right. That just taking the fins, tossing the rest overboard.
00:08:20:00 - 00:08:39:19
Speaker 3
Totally. Yeah. That the space in the hold, especially on old ships that don't have mechanized refrigeration they're using ice is really limited. And the shark, as you know, the bodies emanate, you know, a fair amount of ammonia. And you can really contaminate other fish. So you don't want anything to do with the rest of the body. So they throw up the the shark still alive back in the water and it sinks to the bottom and slowly dies.
00:08:39:21 - 00:08:53:23
Speaker 1
So you're saying a lot of these boats don't have any refrigeration. They're using ice. Surely they're not able to get enough ice from the mother ships to supply a constant, steady, safe keeping temperature for tuna. That is probably ending up in sushi joints in the U.S., right? Yeah.
00:08:53:23 - 00:09:02:17
Speaker 3
I mean, so I'm mixing different types of air, so tuna vessels are different ballgame. That stuff is worth a lot of money. So they tend to be actually refrigeration and because.
00:09:02:17 - 00:09:04:18
Speaker 1
It's that provision.
00:09:04:19 - 00:09:29:01
Speaker 3
But the fishmeal vessels, like the ones I was getting on that spot on the barrow under mechanized, they're just doing everything kind of 19th century version. They have 40 guys when they really should have ten, but they haven't automated a lot of the stuff. So they literally the commanding guys were getting they were a person or so they're putting a huge net in the water in the middle of the night and they have the guys jump in the water in the high seas and actually manually move the net around.
00:09:29:03 - 00:09:45:15
Speaker 3
If one of these guys got caught and pulled on their board, you would not know. There are 40 guys in the middle of the blackness swimming and manually doing this in huge waves. It's crazy. It's crazy. And that's that. That boat should not still be in business. But that's, you know, because you get cheap labor out of Cambodia and those guys are expendable.
00:09:45:15 - 00:09:58:21
Speaker 3
You've got their passports, they have no name, they're trafficked, they're invisible. So if they go under, okay, you're down a man. But that's the consequence. It's not like you've actually engaged in criminal neglect and murder.
00:09:58:23 - 00:10:03:12
Speaker 1
That's a hairy situation. I mean, I have to imagine that they lose a lot of people doing that.
00:10:03:18 - 00:10:25:09
Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean, look, fishing is the most dangerous profession in the world. And up until this year, it had that status. And the the number of the death rate figure that the UN had was about 30,000 This year. These researchers came together and did some whiz bang stuff and they were like, well, the number is actually over 100,000 per year.
00:10:25:09 - 00:10:41:17
Speaker 3
So you're looking at 300 guys dying a day in this in this line of work. So yeah, and that's how they're dying. I mean, there are a lot of them are dying from dumb, you know, kind of lack of training, near-shore accidents. They fall overboard, they drink, you know, infections on decent water vessels. A lot of it's violence.
00:10:41:19 - 00:10:47:22
Speaker 3
But a fair number is just industrial action, accidents that are avoidable.
00:10:48:00 - 00:10:57:01
Speaker 1
Sure. Like getting caught up in nets without having proper flotation or swimming gear or, you know, complications of cables and high tensile things on boats.
00:10:57:03 - 00:11:10:16
Speaker 3
Or a boom knocks a guy overboard and there's no way they can find them. It's nice. And they don't have, you know, herbs or anything, you know, like they don't have the devices that would light up at night. So that guy is gone. It's just that simple. We're not going to find them.
00:11:10:18 - 00:11:31:11
Speaker 1
Now, you've written that around 90 million sharks a year are killed for their fins. There's there's data available that says it might be over 100. There's also conflicting opinions of all that. But I think everyone agrees that it's a lot and probably unsustainable. Does that number sound true to you now? Because I know you wrote that a number of years ago.
00:11:31:13 - 00:12:01:13
Speaker 3
You know, I'm bad on the on the helicopter altitude that allows you to see the big picture. It's so hard generally and especially with dark markets, you know, so I'm always a little nervous, but I do kind of have an instinctive sense of the direction. I don't think it's less I think it's probably more. But the dark secret here is that, you know, we China bash a little easily and China's, you know, a pretty brutal, serious problem when it comes to ocean conservation.
00:12:01:15 - 00:12:19:20
Speaker 3
But there's a lot of shenanigans and sleight of hand on shark issues. And then so you look at the numbers of legal sharks coming out of the water to Ecuador and Peru and export it. And they're shocking. They're huge numbers that make me think that number that you cited is probably an undercount.
00:12:19:22 - 00:12:38:21
Speaker 1
Well, I mean, you say that we China bash easily. And I do think you're right about that. So I'm not contesting that at all. But the other countries which are doing it to their own borders or perhaps under the guise of different vessels, you know, flagged vessels or anything like that, are they largely doing it to serve the Chinese market or are there other markets we should be also focusing on?
00:12:38:21 - 00:12:59:17
Speaker 3
Well, yeah. I mean, I think what I will say, we just spent four years investigating the Chinese to support our fishing fleet. And so it is true that both on scale and behavior, China is the worst. You know, they are China's just a water fishing fleet. Depending on whose numbers you trust, the Chinese government, which is conservative, 2700 right wing think tanks in the US put it at 17,000.
00:12:59:17 - 00:13:21:13
Speaker 3
The next largest system, what? Our fishing fleet is under 300. So they are hugely bigger than anyone else on the planet when it comes to this type of fishing. And then the the brutality on the vessels is on an order of magnitude bigger than and worse than most other players. So I'm not going to pull my punch when it comes to China, their size and their behavior.
00:13:21:15 - 00:13:41:17
Speaker 3
I think that China is just a massive processor exporter, importer and consumer of everything, quite especially seafood. And so, yeah, the consumption of shark fin soup, you know, is really rooted in China. And so a lot of the demand for those fans are going to China.
00:13:41:18 - 00:14:08:00
Speaker 1
Yeah, even when I was living down in Honduras, working with whale sharks down there, we'd frequently say, you know, we'd be driving along little villages and that be a really nice panga with nice Yamaha motors on it or something like that. So expensive boat to be seeing around here. It's worth a heck of a lot more than all these houses and, and the fishermen like, yeah, you know, the Chinese bought it for us and we give them give them our catch and it enables us to go further and longer and farther and, and to do all the job.
00:14:08:02 - 00:14:19:20
Speaker 1
That's, that's pretty crazy. So who's out there policing this? You've said in your work that the policing is is halfhearted at best. I think I'm characterizing that, right. I mean, whose job is it to control this.
00:14:19:22 - 00:14:44:02
Speaker 3
Or so to define that this is the key first step. So when it comes to this, meaning crimes on the high seas, No one, because no one actually has the jurisdiction shown to be out there acting as a cop and no one has the motivation. You know, the budget, even if they did have the jurisdiction, because the high seas block, they have on to No.
00:14:44:02 - 00:15:07:13
Speaker 3
One. And there are some rare scenarios in which foreign countries can board other vessels on the high seas, but it's pretty rare if you've been flagged or etc.. But for the most part, there isn't a presence out there. They're navies out there and they're doing geo political stuff. But Coast guards are not typically patrolling the high seas. The Coast Guard that exist on the planet tend to be of the global North.
00:15:07:13 - 00:15:33:18
Speaker 3
You know, wealthy nations, they tend to stay along the coast. And and now who's policing national waters? Well, that's an interesting other story. So, again, if you look at Global North Global South first, what third World? The Third World generally doesn't have the finances to have vessels and even their own coast guards. So if they have anything trained guys and boats, it's usually donated scenarios.
00:15:33:20 - 00:15:52:02
Speaker 3
Do they have the expertise? Do they have the laws? Do they have any real control over the full swath of their waters? Not so much. They're doing like local level skirmish enforcement. Senegal is coming into Gambia water. Gambia sends its boat over to the edge, you know that, that kind of thing. But they're not doing any real patrolling of.
00:15:52:04 - 00:16:12:14
Speaker 3
So but the high seas is really where it's at, as far as I'm concerned, as a global issue. And this void that's been created by the lack of governance, the lack of real law enforcement is being felt by, you know, NGOs, you know, that are attempting to do things that are right on the edge of a vigilantism.
00:16:12:16 - 00:16:30:05
Speaker 1
Do you have any data or could you perhaps speculate? In my mind, I'm thinking, okay, huge problem with servitude, ocean slavery, illegal crimes out there, and a huge problem with shark finning. If we didn't have the prevalence of bondage in the ocean slavery, would we have a problem with shark finning?
00:16:30:05 - 00:16:57:03
Speaker 3
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. You have really well financed vessels, you know, that aren't using sea slaves and they're shark finning quite aggressively because again, there's this loophole in the law, whether if it's categorized as incidental meaning bycatch, meaning a mistake. If they self categorized that as such, then they're not breaking the law and they come back with tonnage of mistakes that defy the definition of mistake.
00:16:57:05 - 00:17:16:18
Speaker 1
That's right. So there's certainly a link between, say, slavery and shark finning, but they don't go hand in hand so much as to say that if we eliminate one, then the other one goes away. You've done a lot of work in, you know, third world countries. You've you've been on some of these boats. You've been, I guess, in quite a lot of personal peril.
00:17:16:20 - 00:17:25:21
Speaker 1
What is it like to insert yourself into that world as a as a Westerner and just see such a completely different lifestyle?
00:17:25:23 - 00:17:50:13
Speaker 3
I mean, in some ways it's what has me had me leave The New York Times after 17 years and sort of caused some real consternation for my wife, you know, about like, why are you giving up this? So, you know, I was a cultural anthropologist before I was a journalist. And what attracted me, it was a sort of Jane Goodall fascination with exotica, you know, travel really different places on the planet.
00:17:50:15 - 00:18:14:11
Speaker 3
That's what I wanted to do. And I also wanted to focus on things that were bad and try to make a contribution to fix them. So the combination of those two things is what best explains why this line of work captivated me. Because I talk about exotica. This is space travel on earth. You're going to such a foreign, you know, fundamentally foreign setting, not just the anthropology of it and the people, but also just the physics of it.
00:18:14:11 - 00:18:39:21
Speaker 3
And, you know, kind of the beauty and the and the danger and all those things really attracted me. I'm not an adrenaline junkie, so I wasn't hungry for, like, dangerous situations, but I was addicted to wide eyed different situations. And this is a different world. As a Westerner, you know, it's a mixed bag. You know, you get on a vessel like the one I described, you know, 40 Cambodians, all of them trafficked, some as young as 13.
00:18:39:21 - 00:19:06:08
Speaker 3
You know, Thai officers, you are an outsider. And your ability to really get those guys to talk to you is going to be fundamentally limited just by phenotype. You know, And interestingly, like if you airlifted me into some tribe, you know, in the middle of the Amazon, I might have a better time getting them to open up than I do with this tribe called Seafarer fishers.
00:19:06:08 - 00:19:28:19
Speaker 3
You know, because weirdly, this is an unusually insular workforce. You know, they do not take to outsiders at all. I do not trust them. And and they also have time. These are folks that step into a different universe of time. So what you and I have come to think of as a long time is like a blink of the eye for them.
00:19:28:19 - 00:19:46:06
Speaker 3
It's like, okay, it's going to take us three weeks to get to the fishing grounds. You know, like three weeks what you know, and that's just a start. And you're going out. Your contract's two and a half years and you're not going to have any communication with family for 15 months. You know, like you and I would not be comfortable with that, you know, I think.
00:19:46:11 - 00:20:07:05
Speaker 3
And so what that why that's relevant is if you're trying to access their world, you have to actually put in the time of sitting for days upon days of saying nothing, of just being present, not asking questions, not getting in the way, just sort of showing them that you understand their experience, norms of time and hierarchy and language and all these things.
00:20:07:07 - 00:20:14:02
Speaker 3
So it's it's a harder drive to access, you know, to prove yourself. So that's why this reporting is just expensive and slow.
00:20:14:04 - 00:20:32:08
Speaker 1
I remember I used to work on a cruise ship when I was I think I was 21 years old and I left Australia, decided I was going on this great big voyage around the world, joined a cruise ship, jumped on board, thought I was going to be a bartender in the Caribbean Sydney rate as moderate as all the rest.
00:20:32:10 - 00:20:51:18
Speaker 1
I ended up, I landed in Miami and then they turned me around and I forget its name, but whoever was in charge of us, we're all sitting down having dinner and I'm sitting there with a couple of like Indonesian guys, one guy from Haiti and just random crew, right? And then he comes up and goes, okay, you, you and you're you're going to Alaska and no, I'm not going to Alaska.
00:20:51:23 - 00:21:09:02
Speaker 1
Go to the Caribbean, man. You're going to wave. We're short people. You have to go to Alaska. You're going to be a I'm like, well, I'm still going to be a bartender, right? You guys know you're actually going to go to a different service. So I ended up as a busboy living in a completely different class of cabins and everything.
00:21:09:02 - 00:21:28:03
Speaker 1
Cruise ships are a whole big world. I wasn't happy about it, but at least I was free in a sense, to leave. You know, I was signed up for a seven month stint and I bailed. After about two months, I jumped ship in Mexico and which I thought was cool until they said, Well, you're not allowed to jump ship, so we're going to have to deport you and send you home.
00:21:28:03 - 00:21:50:18
Speaker 1
So I officially got deported from Mexico back to Australia and I remember having conversations with guys on the boat there and they were talking about the contracts that they are under and they were guys who'd cried themselves to sleep every night because they were there for seven or nine months. They'd never see their family, they'd send the money home and then they'd, they'd go back, be there for you know, a couple of weeks before they'd take the next contract.
00:21:50:22 - 00:22:05:21
Speaker 1
So they literally lived out at sea. And I thought that was harsh. And then I started watching your stuff and I was like, Oh my God, yeah, these people are just assigned to a, a life of servitude. And one of the things that really stood out to me was a story you had of a guy who couldn't catch his debt.
00:22:05:21 - 00:22:10:09
Speaker 1
I think you referred to it as catching his shadow. Could you tell everyone about that?
00:22:10:11 - 00:22:42:04
Speaker 3
Yeah. So one of the vessels in the first round. So in 2015, when I first began reporting on sea slavery, I went to the South China Sea. I went with this amazing videographer from Brazil, Fabio Nascimento, and focused on trying to get on this subset of transhipment vessels that are especially far from land and found it took weeks and weeks, you know, trying to get out far enough and talk captains into taking us out and handing us off to other ships, etc..
00:22:42:06 - 00:23:09:00
Speaker 3
And we finally found this one vessel that was textbook. It was perfect. 40 Cambodian crew, five Thai officers, and, you know, in broken English with a translator, you know, usually not in line of sight of the captain or the boatswain who would be watching these guys really closely. I could hear what life was like. And one of the guys said, you know, Kappa Kappa, I don't speak Thai, but, you know, he was saying, you can't catch, you can't catch.
00:23:09:00 - 00:23:27:14
Speaker 3
And he was sort of gesturing to show how his shadow, you know, evades him, you know, moves as he moves. And he was trying to convey to me that, you know, this whole notion that you and I might sort of as Westerners, even in a debt bondage scenario, might envision, oh, there's a book, right? And there's accounting, and you work 6 hours a day, so you're down.
00:23:27:14 - 00:23:51:04
Speaker 3
You've earned towards the goal. He was sort of like, that's a joke out here. When you get on the vessel, you leave port, there's no bookkeeping, there's no tally. You stay on that vessel until the captain decides it's time to let you go. And that can be two years. And that's, you know, a verbal contract. And like you said in your story, a lot of these guys are even better off than those Cambodians in which they have a written contract.
00:23:51:04 - 00:24:13:12
Speaker 3
But if you actually read the written contracts, they're shocking. You think that they'd make Dickens blush? You know, they have terms in there that say, you know, they lose their entire salary If they lose, if they leave before a year, anything, you know, snacks, cigarets get deducted. They're paying for their living quarters. They're allowed to be sold boat to boat, you know, traded.
00:24:13:17 - 00:24:24:12
Speaker 3
I mean, these guys have just less than any rights. So but that's the hard reality for tens of thousands of folks and not just on the South China Sea.
00:24:24:14 - 00:24:28:13
Speaker 1
So they literally could just be out there. Debt bonded for life.
00:24:28:15 - 00:24:49:03
Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean, that Lang Lang, the main character that we put on the front page, the New York Times guy who was shackled, he was sold for three and a half years between boat and boat and boat. And on one of them he tried to escape. Another mother ship came near. He jumped off, tried to swim his way there, captured him, brought him back, and for the rest of the his stint on that boat, whenever he wasn't working, they shackled him by the neck.
00:24:49:03 - 00:25:07:15
Speaker 3
And that was the last boat he was on. And a different mother ship worker noticed that this guy was shackled and no one else thought it was odd. And this guy was new to the mother ship business. And he was sort of like, what? You know? And so when he got back, that guy got back to land. He had enough sense, not say anything because everyone else was just pretending like it was normal.
00:25:07:15 - 00:25:28:08
Speaker 3
There was a guy there shackled by the neck, but when he got back to land, this guy discreetly talked to some aid organizations and said, I've witnessed something that's even beyond what I'm used to. And that began a whole six month process where that guy, plus this aid group, bought like Long's Freedom from the Captain and purchased him back to land, which, you know, again, it's it's wow.
00:25:28:10 - 00:25:29:14
Speaker 1
Do you know how much they pay you?
00:25:29:14 - 00:25:35:20
Speaker 3
It was less than the cost of a mule. It was about $650. US for for his freedom.
00:25:35:22 - 00:25:38:03
Speaker 1
So that man's life is worth $650.
00:25:38:03 - 00:25:39:02
Speaker 3
Amazing, right?
00:25:39:04 - 00:25:54:11
Speaker 1
That's insane. So in everything you've been through in putting together this this body of work, besides, I'm not at all talking about financials here. What are the rewards for you? What what benefits do you see from it personally? What do you hope you achieve with it?
00:25:54:12 - 00:26:25:14
Speaker 3
Yeah, I think personally it's nice. You know, spending 17 years at the paper, I was constant. Even when I was investigative. I was only allowed to say on something two years. That's a long time. And then you got to move to some other topic. I understand from an institutional perspective why that makes sense, but it's really nice to to be able to specialize, especially at this at the age I am, you know, And so I've been doing this, you know, almost a decade and there's a fluency in my head that really feels nice because I know something about it, you know?
00:26:25:19 - 00:27:00:06
Speaker 3
So that's rewarding. I also what makes me frustrated and worried is also the thing that makes me feel like I have importance, and that is the sort of anemia of journalism in this space. There's such urgent stories, life and death stories, kind of planetary existential, important stories and so few journalists are doing it. There's a growing number of online folks, but very few out in the space doing investigative really get out there.
00:27:00:08 - 00:27:22:14
Speaker 3
And so that kind of keeps me going at it because I think that, you know, that quotient of urgency versus virginity, you know, journalistic virgin style, so that keeps you motivated. And then also just the the harsher the stuff you see almost in a Catholic guilt kind of way. I'm a far away Catholic. And so maybe that's relevant.
00:27:22:14 - 00:27:51:22
Speaker 3
But, you know, I think you see really dark stuff and you come back and and you feel like, okay, if I owe them anything, it's to do well by them through this story, giving voice to what's going on out there. And and then I get back to my past life in Washington DC and my comfortable everything. And I think, okay, I need to get back out there because I know some bad stuff is happening and I kind of owe it to that space to keep at it.
00:27:52:00 - 00:28:03:10
Speaker 1
Are there are actionable steps that somebody, whether it be governments or people or anything, can do to to solve this problem? Or is it just something that we know about and have to accept?
00:28:03:10 - 00:28:18:22
Speaker 3
No, I think there's a lot that we all can do. I mean, I think first thing is to think of ourselves and multilateral ways like we are not just consumers, we are that we buy stuff, right? And we have politics in our choices and we can inform ourselves and try to do a little bit better by those choices.
00:28:18:22 - 00:28:52:05
Speaker 3
That's leverage. We vote, right? We can ask who we vote for, where are they on issues like this, whatever they are, If your issue is, you know, overfishing, if you're issue is murder of people or if you're issues dumping of oil at sea or whatever, like you can. So your voters, your buyers, your donors, people give money, you know, and so you can figure out organizations that are doing good work and support them and your interlocutor sorry for the wonky term, but like you talk to people, your partners, your kids, your friends, and the more you become fluent, the more you can talk up these issues.
00:28:52:06 - 00:29:02:04
Speaker 3
And that's a public good. That's a public service, You know, just try to disseminating and raising the public awareness of these things. All those things are really concrete things that add up that we all can do.
00:29:02:06 - 00:29:08:13
Speaker 1
Do you feel personally at risk when you go out into the field? I mean, you're you're targeting a criminal empire here.
00:29:08:15 - 00:29:30:00
Speaker 3
Yeah. I mean, look at the last year we did an investigation about abuse of migrants on the Mediterranean, and I took a team to Libya. We are captured by a militia and pretty, pretty brutally abused and only, you know, got out alive with help from the White House. So the times when I've gotten real life and death danger have been on land on these stories.
00:29:30:00 - 00:29:49:14
Speaker 3
Somalia, Borneo, Mexico, Libya. But it's always been on land, on vessels. The risk is different If you're getting if I'm getting on a ship, it's not without without having asked for permission. You just can't. And so the captain's allowing you to board and he's sizing it up and he's thinking, I'm going to lay terms on this guy. And do I trust that he'll follow them?
00:29:49:14 - 00:30:07:06
Speaker 3
And the terms are typically you can't name me, you can't name my vessel, but you can. And if I tell you to get out of the way or get off my vessel, you go and he sizes you up and thinks, Are you trustworthy? And then when you're on there, you're on there as a guest of the captain. So nothing's going to happen to you except you're going to get infections if you're going to stay there for a while.
00:30:07:10 - 00:30:29:05
Speaker 3
He's not taking it back to shore. So you better be ready to like, make sure you can deal with that. You're going to be up nonstop. And it's a dangerous setting, industrial setting, you know, and you can make a mistake and be that guy that falls overboard and he's not going to come back and look for you. And there's just like heavy equipment all over the place where you can just get punctured or hit in the head.
00:30:29:05 - 00:30:37:02
Speaker 3
And so it's really banal threats. It's the conditions that are really the threat to you, not so much the people who want to do me harm.
00:30:37:04 - 00:30:44:18
Speaker 1
But where's the incentive for the captain to even let you on board? Are you paying him or offering him some type of compensation? How do you how to even do?
00:30:44:18 - 00:31:11:14
Speaker 3
That's the million dollar question that's animated, you know, 30 years of reporting. You know, why do people talk to me? I tried to learn the answer to that so I can get more of them to talk to me. I think one people, if you approach them in a way that shows you have fluency of their perspective, maybe even more than them, you know, you kind of almost can be their lawyer and argue their case that wins trust.
00:31:11:16 - 00:31:38:06
Speaker 3
And people are proud of certain things that they do and even things that they're not proud of they have a logic for. So, you know, you know, performative murder, you know, at the beginning of trips to make sure that you're there for tie officers, their 40 young Cambodian crew, you look at the numbers, there's 40 can overwhelm the five unless you do like plantation style performative violence At the outset you beat the hell out of a guy or you kill a guy and everyone's scared.
00:31:38:06 - 00:32:02:14
Speaker 3
And then you have a boatswain who's keeping, you know, real close tabs on are they inching towards mutiny, you know, are there some rabble rousers in their midst? Like this is sort of how these structures work when the numbers don't make sense? Yeah, you're four guys have guns, but there are only four of you, and there are 40 of them All that is to say, like, if you ask the captain why do you beat these guys so aggressively?
00:32:02:16 - 00:32:16:14
Speaker 3
Because do you know what Mutiny looks like? You know, the captains will say they will tear you apart. And I know, guys that that that's happened to. So we have to get in front of that. And we got to do that by showing them who's boss. So understand I don't agree with it, obviously, but like, I really want to shed it.
00:32:16:19 - 00:32:27:14
Speaker 3
So, you know, these are influences. You need to be able to get captains to be intrigued by, like, why is this guy know so much about my world?
00:32:27:16 - 00:32:38:11
Speaker 1
You, you talk about there being people killed on board these the fishing ships, right. So they'd have to dispose of the body somehow. So that would at least be happening at least an isolated case.
00:32:38:11 - 00:33:02:01
Speaker 3
Since 2009, the U.N. did a deep investigation of murder rates on vessels, and they interviewed a whole bunch of Cambodian and low Asian and Burmese crew from Thai vessels and found that 49% of them said that they had witnessed murder of other deckhands in their in their work in the prior five years. That's an insane number. Nearly 50% had witnessed murder.
00:33:02:03 - 00:33:30:03
Speaker 3
So, yeah, murder happens. And we've got this thing coming out, lots of footage of bodies dumped at sea, you know, again, often dying from beriberi or scurvy or ridiculously avoidable criminal neglect type diseases, but some dying from fights, you know, And and then, you know, Montevideo has one dead body every other month being dropped off for the last seven years.
00:33:30:05 - 00:33:48:10
Speaker 3
And most of those are for Chinese. It's great vessels. And a lot of those bodies have like crash marks and really worrisome stuff. But the autopsies are not super aggressive because Uruguay doesn't really it's not their people and they're just kind of a gas station. And the Chinese are long since gone that just dropped the guy off and everybody's got to deal with the sending it the body home.
00:33:48:10 - 00:33:53:19
Speaker 3
So, yeah, there's real strong indicators of serious violence on these vessels.
00:33:53:21 - 00:34:22:04
Speaker 1
Well, you live in a really dark world day. And so I want to encourage everyone to read The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina. It's an incredibly important book and very well researched, and it is an enjoyable read despite the heavy subject matter and the topics that it covers are so important to our daily life. You know, the ocean is such an incredible resource that we all use, whether we're directly connected to the ocean or not.
00:34:22:08 - 00:34:41:07
Speaker 1
We use its resources and we need to know what's going on as consumers and voters and as human beings who care about how this world is managed and and how people experience this life. And I really want to thank you for your work. That's been a very enjoyable chat. And I want to thank you for your time.
00:34:41:10 - 00:34:42:15
Speaker 3
Thanks, Luke.
00:34:42:17 - 00:34:55:08
Speaker 1
And all right, it's time for a shark bite. So every week I ask our researcher Ciara, to dig up something cool that's going on in the oceans so that you leave with the fun facts of the day. What have you got for us this week, Sarah?
00:34:55:10 - 00:34:59:22
Speaker 4
All right. This week's shark bite is about dispelling the commonly held myth.
00:35:00:00 - 00:35:01:10
Speaker 1
Love it. Let's go.
00:35:01:12 - 00:35:28:02
Speaker 4
So most people have probably heard that rainforests contribute 20% to the world's oxygen. That's a number that's thrown out there a lot, according to the best science today. That's actually pretty misleading. While all land based plants do produce and these rainforests do produce a lot of oxygen, they actually have a net zero impact on the oxygen on the earth because all the oxygen that's produced by these rainforests are actually used up by the same biome that produced it.
00:35:28:04 - 00:35:47:03
Speaker 1
Yeah, I've heard those numbers, especially when politicians get on and they start talking about, you know, the Amazon is the lungs of the earth and stuff and not discounting the fact that it's an incredibly important ecosystem for a number of different reasons, but it's not the oxygen producer people think it is, or at least the politicians. So where does our oxygen come from here?
00:35:47:05 - 00:36:06:11
Speaker 4
So actually comes from the ocean. There's estimates that say up to 80% of the oxygen we breathe every day comes from the ocean. And even more crazy than that is that there's this teeny tiny little creature called a prochlorococcus, and it's the single smallest organism on earth that photosynthesize. So it takes the sunlight and turns it into energy.
00:36:06:12 - 00:36:19:22
Speaker 4
And this Prochlorococcus is responsible for one fifth of the oxygen on Earth. So pretty crazy number. But another way to throw it out there is every fifth breath that we take. We owe thanks to this teeny, tiny little creature.
00:36:20:00 - 00:36:41:22
Speaker 1
That's amazing. And even more amazing that you can say Clark Proctor caucused so easily or always had trouble with the score. So there you go. Everyone out there, Sierra has busted that myth that you've heard about the rainforest being so productive. I mean, we're not discounting their importance, but a lot of our oxygen comes from the ocean, so it's even more important that we take care of it.
00:36:42:00 - 00:36:43:09
Speaker 1
Thanks so much, Sarah. That was awesome.
00:36:43:12 - 00:36:47:20
Speaker 4
Yeah, any time.
00:36:47:22 - 00:37:04:08
Speaker 1
All right. That's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for joining us on Shark Week, the podcast. Also want to thank Ian Urbina for his contribution to today's conversation. Some very heavy stuff, but very important stuff for us all to know about. I hope you learned something today. Until next time, I'm electable. I'll catch you soon.
00:37:04:10 - 00:37:15:06
Unknown
You're listening to the Shark Week Podcast
00:37:15:08 - 00:37:44:19
Speaker 4
Shark Week, the podcast is produced by Delve Media for Warner Brothers. Luke Tipple is the executive producer, and our writer and producer is Yale Rice, our researcher and associate producer, a Sierra Kehoe for Warner Brothers Discovery. The executive producer is Christina Bavetta, and the coordinating producer is Corin Wilson. You can follow our show wherever you get your podcasts, and we'd love it if you could take a second to leave us a five star review and subscribe to help our mission to give sharks a voice.