Slavery and that Thai tinned fish

Was Your Seafood Caught By Slaves? AP Uncovers Unsavory Trade : The Salt : NPR:

"Some of the seafood that winds up in American grocery stores, in restaurants, even in cat food may have been caught by Burmese slaves. That's the conclusion of a yearlong investigation by The Associated Press.

The AP discovered and interviewed dozens of men being held against their will on Benjina, a remote Indonesian island, which serves as the base for a trawler fleet that fishes in the area. AP correspondent Martha Mendoza was one of the lead reporters for the investigation.

The men AP found unloading seafood in Benjina were mostly from Myanmar, also known as Burma. When they realized one of the AP reporters spoke Burmese, "they began calling out, asking for help, and explaining that they were trapped and that they were being beaten and that they were enslaved," Mendoza tells NPR's Renee Montagne.

... After the AP reporters made this discovery, they began tracking where the seafood went. They watched the seafood get loaded into a cargo ship called the Silver Sea Lion, then used GPS to track it to a port in Thailand.

"We followed as many as we could to the processing plants," Mendoza says. Literally. The seafood was offloaded into some 150 trucks. The reporters — in cars — followed as many of those trucks as they could, taking notes, shooting video and jotting down the names of the plants where the seafood was delivered."

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