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Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Business
- Boston Globe
Forced labor in the shrimp industry, and a whistleblower's efforts to expose it
Joshua Farinella, formerly the general manager of the plant in Amalapuram, India. Ben Blankenship/The Outlaw Ocean Project Farinella's dream quickly turned into a nightmare. He soon discovered that the plant's largely female employees were effectively trapped on the compound, routinely underpaid, and forced to live in inhumane, unsanitary conditions. The managers were also misleading auditors and processing shrimp with banned antibiotics. It soon dawned on him that he'd been hired as an American face to 'whitewash' a forced-labor factory. Over several months, Farinella meticulously gathered evidence that he brought to The Outlaw Ocean team. The results of that investigation are the subject of the fifth episode of The Outlaw Ocean Podcast, Season 2. The podcast is available on all major streaming platforms. For transcripts, background reporting, and bonus content, visit Female workers in full PPE work grueling hours processing shrimp at Choice Canning Plant #4. Some reported they had not had a day off work in over two years. Ben Blankenship/The Outlaw Ocean Project In recent years, India has exploded as the dominant source of shrimp for much of the world, with support from its government through subsidies and loosened foreign investment restrictions. In 2021, India exported more than $5 billion of shrimp globally and was responsible for nearly a quarter of the world's shrimp exports. Choice Canning is one of the largest Indian suppliers in the market, with corporate offices in two big Indian cities, Kochi and Chennai, as well as in Jersey City, N.J. Choice Canning categorically denied Farinella's claims and said that the company never underpaid workers, prevented them from leaving without permission, or maintained subpar living conditions. On any given day, there might be more than 650 workers at the plant, typically hired by third-party contractors. Hundreds of the workers lived locally in Andhra Pradesh and went home at the end of each day. The rest were migrant workers recruited from impoverished corners of the country who lived at the plant. A security guard was usually posted outside near the building's front door. Farinella found migrant workers living on the compound in deplorable circumstances, like shared beds with bedbug-infested mattresses. There were also dangerous conditions, including a secret dorm above the plants' ammonia compressors. He realized there were hundreds more people living on site than the paperwork accounted for, and they could not freely leave. At Choice Canning plant #4 in Amalapuram, India, in a hidden, off-books men's dorm located on top of an ammonia compressor shed, some workers were forced to sleep on the floor because of a lack of beds. Joshua Farinella At 3 a.m. on November 11, 2023, a manager sent Farinella a WhatsApp message informing him that a woman had been found running through the plant's water treatment facility. 'She was searching for a way out of here,' the manager wrote. 'Her contractor is not allowing her to go home.' The woman made it as far as the main gate but was turned back by guards. Forbidding workers to leave their plants is a violation of the Indian constitution and also likely violates the country's penal code, according to the The rear wall of the factory grounds, as seen here through the plant's security cameras, was the site of a reported escape by one of the migrant workers. After the incident, the plant management ordered the walls to be "repaired" so that no other workers could get out. Ben Blankenship/The Outlaw Ocean Project On January 3, 2024, reported that a group of about 70 workers, many of them women, marched to a police station in the Andhra Pradesh province to demand that action be taken against a labor contractor at their workplace, the nearby Choice Canning shrimp factory. The workers alleged that the plant's labor contractor stole approximately $2,600 in wages, equivalent to about two years of an average worker's salary. They also demanded a manager be charged for abusive language under Indian legislation that seeks to prevent hate crimes against members of underprivileged castes — many of the workers were members of India's lowest caste, called Dalits, or untouchables. After local media covered the incident, Choice Canning's human resources officer emailed Farinella to say they had already properly paid a contractor, who then withheld payment from the workers. Following police intervention, the contractor repaid roughly $1,600 to the workers. Farinella was concerned when he found workers sleeping on the floor, but he said he and others struggled to get authorization to improve conditions. A few weeks later during a recorded conversation with two labor contractors for Choice Canning, he discovered that 150 workers had not had a day off in a year. It was also hard, he said, to tell how long employees spent working. A human resources executive admitted candidly in a Zoom meeting recorded by Farinella how she planned to modify attendance records and timecards in preparation for an upcoming audit by a German supermarket chain. Workers peel shrimp at an off-books peeling shed for Choice Canning in Amalapuram, India in February of 2024. Joshua Farinella Processing seafood is a race against the clock to prevent spoilage, so the Choice Canning plant in Amalapuram runs more or less 24/7. There's also not a lot of automation in shrimp processing, so this means that the factory relies on an enormous amount of labor to deliver 40 shipping containers full of packaged shrimp every single day. The same week that the whistleblower documents were published by After leaving his job at Choice Canning in February 2024, Farinella returned to the United States and filed whistleblower complaints to several federal agencies. These complaints allege a variety of food safety violations, including that the company knowingly and illegally exported shrimp that had tested positive for antibiotics to major American brands in violation of federal law. The shrimp processed at the plant came from nearby aquaculture farms like this one. Farinella said it was often unclear which farms supplied the plant because deliveries from certified and uncertified farms were routinely commingled. Ben Blankenship/The Outlaw Ocean Project Farinella's whisteblowing has had impact. In 2024, the US Department of Labor placed India's shrimp industry into the 'forced labor' category in its This April, President Trump signed an executive order promoting domestic fishing and seafood production, including by raising tariffs on Indian shrimp. The US shrimp industry commended the decisions, suggesting that federal agencies and the administration may be responding — directly or indirectly — to the types of abuses Farinella exposed. But for Farinella himself, his decision to speak out has come with a personal cost. 'Now when I submit a resume, I can't even get the courtesy of a rejection email,' he said in a recent interview. Still, he has been struck by the impact his decision to reveal the industry's dirty secrets has had. 'I was very surprised with how quickly it took off and how many people were paying attention to it,' he said. Maybe, he still hopes, he has helped push the industry toward necessary change.
Boston Globe
30-06-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Was your cargo ship hijacked? Try this guy.
Hardberger runs a rare kind of repo service — extracting huge ships from foreign ports. His company is a last resort for shipowners whose vessels have been seized, often by bad actors. And over the years he's built a reputation for taking the kinds of jobs others turn down. Hardberger's specialty is infiltrating hostile territory and taking control of ships in whatever way he can — usually through subterfuge and stealth. Wherever in the world his missions take him, Hardberger thrives in its grey areas. He handles the toughest of grab-and-dash jobs in foreign harbors, usually on behalf of banks, insurers, or shipowners. A last-resort solution to a common predicament, he is called when a vessel has been stolen, its operators have defaulted on their mortgage, or a ship has been fraudulently detained by local officials. Advertisement The public perception of modern piracy usually involves Somalis in fast boats capturing tankers on the high seas. Of late, the Houthis launching from Yemen have revived global concern about attacks on merchant vessels and the global importance of maritime commerce, since more than 90 percent of all products reach consumers by way of ships. But the more common though overlooked threat at sea is white-collar piracy: schemes where ships get held captive in port through bureaucratic or administrative means. The pirates are actually different groups of mortgage lenders, lawyers, shipowners, or shipping companies, and they might be sitting in an office a half a world away from the ship. Max Hardberger, third from right, and Ian Urbina of the Outlaw Ocean Project, second from right, pose with the Haitian marine police after several days of patrols. The Outlaw Ocean Project And sometimes when the ships are caught up in this kind of piracy, a repo man gets the call. This type of offshore crime and the role of maritime repo men is the subject of the fourth episode of The Outlaw Ocean Podcast, Season 2, during which a reporting team trailed Hardberger on an especially tough mission in Greece. The podcast is available on all major streaming platforms. For transcripts, background reporting, and bonus content, visit Port scams are as old as shipping itself and seasoned repo men can identify them by name. 'Unexpected complications': a shipyard makes repairs without permission, then sends the owner an astronomical bill, often for more than the value of the ship, hoping to force its forfeiture. 'Barratry': buying off crews, sometimes paying more than a year's wages to leave a ship's keys and walk away. 'A docking play': a shipowner defaults on his mortgage, but is in cahoots with a marina, which charges the repossessor hyperinflated docking fees. Advertisement Consumers are affected by the theft and corruption because it adds millions of dollars to transport costs and insurance rates, raising sticker prices by more than 10 percent, maritime researchers say. Tens of thousands of boats or ships are stolen around the world each year and are difficult to find because the ocean is vast, the search is often too expensive, and because ships frequently end up in ports with uncooperative or corrupt officials. But when the boat or ship is more valuable, 'repo men' like Hardberger are hired to find it. Most recoveries of stolen boats and maritime repossessions involve doing paperwork and working with banks and local law enforcement. But when negotiations fail, waterborne jailbreaks sometimes occur. The moment that catapulted Hardberger into the spotlight came in 2004, when his team was hired to find the Maya Express, whose mortgagee was looking to use the ship as collateral on a loan but couldn't find it. They found the Maya Express in Miragoane, Haiti, a small port village, and learned that a judicial auction was set to take place in just two days, threatening to complicate the repossession. 'We had to do something in two days. We could not wait,' Hardberger told The Outlaw Ocean Project. So, accompanied by two armed SWAT agents, Hardberger approached the men guarding the Maya Express and offered $300 to each of them to leave. With the guards out of the way, Hardberger and his team hitched the vessel to a tugboat and began the delicate task of cutting the anchor chains. 'Unfortunately it was a full moon and not a cloud in the sky. The entire bay was lit up so people came running down from the hills to see what was going on,' Hardberger recalled. Advertisement Whenever onlookers came near the ship, the two armed men kept them on the dock and did not let anybody leave until the anchor chain was fully cut. Once the ship was free, the tugboat pulled the Maya Express into international waters and eventually toward the Bahamas. 'It was the worst possible condition for an extraction but we managed to get it out,' Hardberger said. All of the repo men The Outlaw Ocean Project talked to said they abide by certain self-imposed rules. No violence — better, they said, to hire street youths for lookouts, bar owners for diversions, and prostitutes to flirt their way on board to spy. To talk his way on board, Mr. Hardberger said he has a collection of fake uniforms and official-sounding business cards, among them 'Port Inspector,' 'Marine Surveyor,' and 'Internal Auditor.' He also carries a glass vial of magnetic powder to sprinkle on the hull to reveal lettering that has been welded off. Officials from the Haitian Coast Guard, Interpol, and the bar association in California, where Hardberger is licensed, said they had no records of complaints, disciplinary actions, or arrest warrants against him. When we asked Hardberger how much longer he thinks he can keep doing this work, he replied, 'I don't know. As long as I can run to the end of the dock and jump in the water and swim to safety, I guess.'
Boston Globe
23-06-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
‘Humanitarian rescue' of migrants, or the EU's dirty work?
Though illegal under international law, the Libyan capture of migrants on the Mediterranean Sea has become commonplace in recent years as the EU has outsourced its effort to stop refugees from crossing its borders. Of course, Europe is not alone in this effort; Australia detains undocumented migrants in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. Under the Obama administration, the American government paid the Mexican government to detain undocumented people trying to enter the United States. The Trump administration has since gone a big step further: shipping hundreds of undocumented people from US soil to a notoriously brutal mega-prison in El Salvador. Migrant prisoners sit on the floor at Sabah Detention Center. Pierre Kattar / Mohammed David /The Outlaw Ocean Project Candé's story unfolds over the first three episodes of the new season of For more than a decade, the EU has supplied the coast guard cutters, supplies for detention centers, aerial intelligence, and vehicles that the Libyans use to capture migrants crossing the Mediterranean hoping for a better life. Efficient and brutal, the at-sea capture and internment of these migrants in prisons in and around Tripoli is what European Union officials hail as part of a successful partnership with Libya in their 'humanitarian rescue' efforts across the Mediterranean. But the true intent of this joint campaign, according to many human rights advocates, legal experts, and members of the European Parliament, is less to save migrants from trafficking or drowning than to stop them from reaching European shores. A handout from on Frontex aerial drones operating on the Mediterranean to locate migrant boats for the purpose of blocking them from entering Europe. Ed Ou//The Outlaw Ocean Project Though the Libyan Coast Guard routinely opens fire on migrant rafts, has been tied by the United Nations to human trafficking and murder, and is now run by militias, it continues to draw strong EU support. Since at least 2017, the EU, led by Italy, has trained and equipped the Libyan Coast Guard to serve as a proxy maritime force, whose central purpose is to stop migrants from reaching European shores. As part of a broader investigation, a reporter for The Outlaw Ocean Project, Ed Ou, spent several weeks in 2021 aboard a Doctors Without Borders vessel, filming its attempts to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean. The work is a life-or-death race. While the humanitarian ship tries to rescue migrants and take them to safety in Europe, the far faster, bigger, and more aggressive Libyan Coast Guard ships try to get to the migrants first so they can instead arrest them and return them to prisons in Libya. The EU has long denied playing an active role in this effort, but the reporters filmed drones operated by Frontex that are used to alert the Libyans to the exact location of migrant rafts. An aid worker on a MSF ship keeps an eye on a Libyan Coast Guard vessel cutting across their bow at high speed. Ed Ou//The Outlaw Ocean Project '[Frontex] has never engaged in any direct cooperation with Libyan authorities,' the Frontex press office said in a statement responding to requests for comment on the investigation. But a mounting body of evidence collected by European journalists and nongovernmental organizations suggests that Frontex's involvement with the Libyan authorities is neither accidental nor limited. In 2020, for instance, Aside from the EU role in helping Libya capture migrants at sea, the UN as well as humanitarian and human rights groups have roundly criticized European authorities for their role in creating and subsidizing a gulag of brutal migrant prisons in Libya. The EU has provided Libya with coast guard cutters, SUVs, and buses for moving captured migrants to prison. For the EU, the challenge of how best to handle desperate migrants fleeing hardships in their native countries will only grow in coming years. Climate change is expected to displace 150 million people across the globe in the next 50 years. Rising seas, desertification, and famine promise to drive desperate people to global north countries like the US and Europe, testing the moral character and political imagination of these wealthier nations. These factors were especially palpable for Aliou Candé, who grew up on a farm near the remote village of Sintchan Demba Gaira, Guinea-Bissau, a place without basic amenities like plumbing or electricity. Candé had a reputation as a dogged worker, who avoided trouble of any kind. 'People respected him,' his brother Jacaria said. In May 2021, journalists for The Outlaw Ocean Project reported from Libya, the Mediterranean, and Guinea Bissau to piece together the story of Aliou Candé. They spoke with friends, relatives, community leaders, and other prisoners held in cell four of Al Mabani to understand the circumstances leading up to his death. Critically, Candé's uncle had contacts for Candé's family back in Guinea-Bissau, and we were able to begin to put together a portrait. But the 28-year-old would become a climate migrant. Droughts in Guinea-Bissau had become more common and longer, flooding became more unpredictable and damaging, and Candé's crops — cassava, mangoes, and cashews — were failing and his children were going hungry. Milk production from his cows was so meager that his children were allowed to drink it just once a month. The shift in climate had brought more mosquitos, and with them more disease. He believed there was only one way to improve their conditions: to go to Europe. His brothers had done it. His family encouraged him to try. In the late summer of 2019, he set out for Europe with six hundred Euros. He told his wife he was not sure how long he'd be away, but he did his best to be optimistic. 'I love you,' he told her, 'and I'll be back.' In January 2020, he arrived in Morocco, where he tried to pay for a passage on a boat to Spain, but learned that the price was three thousand Euros, much more than he had. Candé then headed to Libya, where he could book a cheaper raft to Italy. In February 2021, he and more than a hundred other migrants pushed off from the Libyan shore aboard an inflatable rubber raft. After their boat was detected by the Libyan Coast Guard, the migrants were taken back to land, loaded by armed guards into buses and trucks, and driven to Al Mabani, which is Arabic for 'the buildings.' Candé was not charged with a crime or allowed to speak to a lawyer, and he was given no indication of how long he'd be detained. In his first days there, he kept mostly to himself, submitting to the grim routines of the place. The prison was controlled by a militia that euphemistically calls itself the Public Security Agency, and its gunmen patrolled the hallways. Cells were so crowded that the detainees had to sleep in shifts. In a special room, guards hung migrants upside from ceiling beams and beat them. In an audio message recorded on a hidden cell phone, Candé made a plea to his family to send the ransom for his release. In the early hours of April 8, 2021, he was shot to death when guards fired indiscriminately into a cellblock of detainees during a fight. His death went uninvestigated, his killer unpunished. Aliou Candé was buried in an overcrowded migrant cemetery in Tripoli, more than 2,000 miles from his family in Guinea-Bissau. Bir al-Osta Milad Cemetery where Aliou Candé and other dead migrants are buried. Pierre Kattar/The Outlaw Ocean Project One month after Candé's death, a team of four reporters from the Outlaw Ocean Project traveled to Libya to investigate. Almost no Western journalists are permitted to enter Libya, but, with the help of an international aid group, they were granted visas. Initially, Libyan officials said the team could visit Al Mabani, but after a week in Tripoli it became clear that this would not happen. So the journalists found a hidden spot on a side street, a half-mile from the detention center, and launched a small drone. The drone made it to the facility unnoticed, and captured close-ups of the prison's open courtyard. The team also interviewed dozens of migrants who had been imprisoned with Candé at the same detention center. A week into the investigation, the lead reporter, Ian Urbina, was speaking with his wife from his hotel room in Tripoli when he heard a knock at the door. Upon opening it, he was confronted by a dozen armed men who stormed into the room. He was immediately forced to the ground, a gun pressed to his forehead, and a hood placed over his head. What followed was a violent assault: The journalist sustained broken ribs, facial injuries, and internal trauma after being kicked repeatedly. Other members of the team — including an editor, photographer, and filmmaker — were also detained. The group was blindfolded, separated, and interrogated for hours at a time. Under Libyan law, authorities may detain foreign nationals indefinitely without formal charges. The US State Department became involved after the journalist's wife, who had heard the commotion over the phone, raised the alarm. American officials quickly identified the detaining authority and began negotiating for the team's release. After six days in custody, the team was unexpectedly told they were free to leave. No formal charges were filed and no official explanation for their detention was provided. They were lucky. The experience — deeply frightening but mercifully short — offered a glimpse into the world of indefinite detention in Libya. With no explanation from the government, fanfare by aid groups, nor coverage by domestic or foreign media, Al Mabani officially closed on January 13, 2022. In its roughly 12-month lifespan, the prison became emblematic of the unaccountable nature of Libya's broader detention system. The quiet shuttering of Al Mabani illustrates the ever-shifting nature of incarceration in Libya and how such transience makes protection of detainees nearly impossible. In the same month that Al Mabani was closed, the team behind the reporting presented details of their investigation to the European Parliament's human rights committee, and outlined the EU's extensive support for Libya's migration control apparatus. European Commission representatives took issue with the reporters' characterization of the crisis. 'We are not funding the war against migrants,' said Rosamaria Gili, the Libya country director at the European External Action Service. 'We are trying to instill a culture of human rights.' And yet, just a week later, Henrike Trautmann, a representative of the European Commission, told lawmakers that the EU was going to provide five more vessels to the Libyan Coast Guard to bolster its ability to intercept migrants on the high seas. A small wooden boat packed with refugees waving and smiling with elation after being found by MSF aid workers. Ed Ou//The Outlaw Ocean Project 'We know the Libyan context is far from optimal for this,' Trautmann conceded. 'We think it's still preferable to continue to support this than to leave them to their own devices.' Meanwhile, the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean continues. At least two thousand migrants died in 2024 while making this perilous passage, according to the UN, and, during the same period, the Libyan Coast Guard captured an additional twenty thousand that were brought back to prisons like Al Mabani in and around Tripoli. In February of this year, Libyan authorities held a training exercise with the EU border officials. The Trump administration has also taken note: In May, The status of both of those plans remains unclear.
