Seafood Slaves

We travel to Indonesia, Myanmar and Thailand to investigate slavery in the multi-billion dollar seafood industry.



In 2015, evidence of slavery on a massive scale surfaced in the remote islands of eastern Indonesia.

Illegal fishing in Indonesian territorial waters had risen to an extreme level, but many of the Thai fishing boats responsible harboured a much worse secret aboard.

In the last year, over 2,000 men have come forward who were enslaved on Thai fishing boats in Indonesian waters, working for as long as a decade without pay.

Thousands of migrants from Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos in search of higher-paying jobs were lured onto Thai fishing boats with empty promises about jobs "on the other side" and into, in some cases, years of ongoing seaborne labour.