Labor Violations & Human Rights Abuse in the Southeast Asian Seafood Industry — Part 5: Vietnam

Chainparency
Chainparency
Published in
5 min readMay 23, 2023

By Bowin Lee

Vietnam is one of the foremost Southeast Asian fishing nations, possessing a coastline of 2025 miles, with over 3000 various islands, and a wealth of freshwater rivers and estuaries. Its famous Mekong and Red River Delta areas are among the most productive fishery zones in the world. Its coastal provinces and cities contain over half the population, and the majority of laborers are employed in maritime linked occupations. More than 10% of the Vietnamese population’s main income source comes from fisheries. As such, the seafood and fishery sector is hugely important to its economy for both food security for its own population, exports abroad, and as an economic driver though employment. The Vietnamese aquaculture and fishery sector has grown 5% every year since 1985, alongside export values which have also grown year over year. It is now the world’s fourth ranked seafood exporter, exporting billions of dollars of shrimp, tuna, and other marine products worth 1.6 billion USD in 2021. Vietnam’s top four largest export destinations being the US, Japan, China, and the European Union, respectively as of August 2021.

However, with a lucrative fishing industry comes a host of familiar problems. Vietnam has unfortunately become a textbook example of how rampant and unregulated expansion in the fishing industry leads to the rapid overuse and exhaustion of marine resources. Many coastal ecosystem collapses have been attributed to overfishing by vessels using IUU labor. And though Vietnam has focused on sustainable development in its seafood industry, the many small-scale fisheries have attributes that are not conducive to allowing a strong monitoring system to develop, as it is difficult to oversee so many unconnected independent vessels. Accordingly, this causes the same issues of ships venturing further from their coastlines and more frequently fishing illegally in neighboring national waters far beyond their home shores.

Vietnam’s private fishing vessels have spread across the Southeast Asia ocean regions, and from 2018 to 2019, there were reports of 250 arrests and seizures of Vietnamese vessels, along with 640 crew members across 11 countries. Furthermore, there is evidence of child laborers as young as 11 years old aboard numerous vessels, illegal by both international and Vietnamese domestic law. Many boats documented by independent surveyors were also found to be flagless, intentionally overing or hiding names and registration identification, as well as lacking any crew identity lists or other documents. Fishermen interviewed also stated that inspections by port authorities and the coast guard were rare, or able to be bribed. Thus, inspections do not detect any human rights violations such as child labor, illegally caught fish species, or illegal workers. There is a critical lack of transparency and sustainability evident in the Vietnamese fishing industry, and the international community has taken notice.

In 2017, the EU issued Vietnam a Yellow Card warning to Vietnam which has not been removed since. If a country further fails to comply with EU regulations, it is issued a red card, resulting in full sanctions on certain trade goods from the EU until the country can comply. The yellow card is removed when a country has “made credible progress in improving their fisheries governance and combatting IUU”. A yellow card comes with serious reputational and economic consequences for the country that it has been issued to. After the yellow card has been issued, all seafood containers from the exporting country are detained to check their sources, taking sometimes up to 3–4 weeks per container with an inspection fee of $700 per container. There is also the risk that the containers will be rejected and sent back to the home country and cause massive losses to the producer. As an example, when Philippines was issued a yellow card from 2014–2015, 70% of its containers were rejected. EU consumers as well, are afraid of being fined under EU regulations, and often reduce or halt purchases after official warnings are published in the EU’s magazines and websites.

A ripple effect also may take place, especially in other markets that seek to crack down on IUU fishing, such as the United States, which has been applying a new seafood import control system to protect its domestic producers from cheap competition since the beginning of 2018. The US is a top destination export market for Vietnam, accounting for around 22% of its total shrimp exports. New regulation requiring increased evidence of properly regulated fishing is likely to pose problems the Vietnamese shrimp harvesters specifically. for Beyond the western economic sphere, Japan is cracking down on IUU fishing by passing significant domestic regulations, as well as increasing its international coordination by ratifying international treaties that unify joint efforts with the EU, ASEAN, the US, and other nations. Thus, three out of four of Vietnam’s major seafood export markets have been heavily interested in limiting IUU in seafood. If Vietnam is unable to combat IUU issues in its waters, there could be continuingly severe significant negative economic consequences than have already taken place due to the EU’s yellow card.

According to a report released by the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers, in coordination with the World Bank, losses to Vietnam’s seafood industry because of the yellow card have amounted to 183.5 million USD, as well as causing continuous decline in volume of exports to the EU market since 2017. Furthermore, the EU has dropped from its position as the second largest importer of Vietnamese seafood after 2019, to the 4th largest importer. If Vietnam’s IUU situation does not improve and it is given a red card by the European Commission, a trade ban stands to cause 480 million losses in USD, in addition to any other possible bans or sanctions it might be hit with by other countries reacting to the EU’s red card. However, if the yellow card is removed because of Vietnam’s improvement, there is a large opportunity to recover market share and increase the value of its total seafood exports to Europe by 1.2 to 1.4 billion dollars within the next few years. Strong growth is expected in Vietnam’s seafood sector even with the yellow card by the European Commission.

Vietnam has made considerable improvements since being issued a yellow card, as noted by the World Bank’s follow up report and assessment on recommendations previously made by the Commission. The recommendations to halt IUU fishing were: (1) the legal framework; (2) monitoring and control systems for fishing vessels; (3) law enforcement; and (4) traceability of caught fisheries. Vietnam’s efforts were officially recognized and deemed to be on the right track towards having improved monitoring, control, and in particular vessel surveillance. Despite this, there are still some failings, as the installation progress for monitoring equipment is slow, and surveillance systems themselves were found to be opaque and riddled with mechanical and technical errors, alongside a limited scale. Furthermore, there was no evidence to definitively prove that authorities could demonstrate “accurate traceability mechanisms in fishery processing plants”, and the European Commission stated that it would not remove the yellow card until Vietnam addressed and solved the issue of its vessels illegally fishing in foreign waters.

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