A six-month investigation by The Guardian 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.[1]

And the revelations don’t end there. Three big global retailers — Walmart, Carrefour and Costco — are all named as customers of a seafood supplier in Thailand with proven links to slavery. Which means that prawns and shrimp whose production relies upon slave labour might well end up in your shopping basket.

Call on the big three retailers to help eliminate modern slavery in the Thai fishing industry by:

• Joining Thailand-based initiative Project Issara, co-ordinated by Anti-Slavery International, designed to eliminate modern slavery from the Thai seafood industry;[2]
  
  
• Enforcing their zero tolerance policies on forced labour by independently inspecting their Thai supply chain for modern slavery and publishing their findings.

Encouragingly, Tesco has already agreed to take these necessaryand practical steps, following the revelations in The Guardian. By sending a strong message to the three remaining major retailers, we can help ensure that the 300,000 people working in Thailand’s fishing industry are treated as human beings, not slaves.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/jun/10/supermarket-prawns-thailand-produced-slave-labour