Slavery might be in your shopping basket - They sold us like animals, but we are not animals – we are human beings. - Vuthy, a former monk from Cambodia who was sold from captain to captain on Thai fishing ships.1 It would be too awful to believe -- if it weren’t in cold, hard, newsprint. A six-month investigation by the Guardian Newspaper has found that the Thai fishing industry is “built on slavery”, with trafficked workers enduring 20-hour shifts, regular beatings, torture and execution-style killings. Some are even driven to suicide, all to support the flow of cheap farmed prawns and shrimp sold around the world.2 And the revelations don’t end there. The four big global retailers -- Walmart, Carrefour, Costco and Tesco -- are all named as customers of a seafood supplier in Thailand with proven links to slavery. Which means that prawns and shrimp farmed with slave labour might well be ending up in your shopping basket. TAKE ACTION: Tell the big four retailers to use their buying power to help eliminate modern slavery in the Thai fishing industry. For many years, anti-slavery activists have raised concerns over reports of trafficking and forced labour in Thailand’s $7.3 billion seafood export industry.3 But now, for the first time, we have clear evidence that slave labour is used to catch ‘trash fish’ fed to prawns sold in leading supermarkets around the world. Even experienced observers are shocked by the revelations. Slavery survivors report being bought and sold like animals in Thailand, some for as little as US$420. In one gut-wrenching example, a trafficking victim who tried to escape was tied, limb by limb, to the bows of four boats and pulled apart at sea in front of other fishermen in slavery. With the evidence in plain sight, the case for action is clear. But change won’t happen by itself. We need to send a strong message to the four major retailers to enforce their supplier standards prohibiting forced labour, and pressure their Thai suppliers to cut modern slavery out of the purchasing and production process. Tell Walmart, Carrefour, Costco and Tesco to stand up to their seafood suppliers in Thailand, and help end the atrocious abuse of trafficked workers. Thank you in advance for your support. After you’ve taken action, please forward this email to three of your friends, and help ensure that the estimated 300,000 people working in Thailand’s fishing industry are treated as human beings, not slaves. In solidarity, Debra, Joanna, Kamini, Jess & the Walk Free team and Aidan and Jakub at Anti-Slavery International P.S. On Twitter? Follow us. 1 theguardian/global-development/2014/jun/10/supermarket-prawns-thailand-produced-slave-labour 2 theguardian/global-development/2014/jun/10/supermarket-prawns-thailand-produced-slave-labour 3 ejfoundation.org/oceans/soldtothesea Walk Free is a movement of people everywhere, fighting to end one of the worlds greatest evils: Modern slavery. Follow on Twitter | Friend on Facebook | Subscribe on Youtube | View this email in your browser
Posted on: Fri, 13 Jun 2014 21:55:50 +0000
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