An official observer of marine fisheries, Cagilaba was miles offshore of the Marshall Islands, dispatched aboard the seiner then known as the Sea Quest. It was 2015. He had a background in marine affairs and was working for the Fijian government in its national Ministry of Fisheries, tasked with upholding a patchwork of regulations meant to safeguard tuna.

He was used to being a lone technician amid raucous crews, overseeing fishing on vessels from all over the world. He had been an observer for 18 years, deployed for weeks at a time in gigs that net some of the best wages around. But this deployment was an outlier. Earlier in the trip, Cagilaba had watched as the captain of the Sea Quest twice falsified catch reports.

Then he’d seen two crewmen dumping 10 hefty bales of plastic and straps into the sea. The captain had been menacing Cagilaba ever since, pestering him to censor his report in a not-nice way that went from uncomfortable to unnerving. Once back on land, it was a saga that would cost Cagilaba his job. But the trick at the time was to stay alive until he got there.

“Others will not be coming home at all,” Cagilaba said. Years later, he recalled the experience in testimony to Congress during a probe of observer harassment at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an agency his employer frequently partnered with.

His story echoes others like it. Harassment of marine observers aboard fishing vessels is one of the industry’s worst-kept secrets. In a survey of observers in the United States alone, about half said that they had been harassed on the job. Anecdotally, Liz Mitchell, president of the Association for Professional Observers (APO) and herself a former observer, says the APO routinely logs stories of such incidents. The APO’s website describes them in detail: observers locked in their rooms, threatened at knifepoint, chased around docks, forced to accept bribes, raped, starved, pressured to sign off on sustainability criteria. Conditions in the South Pacific are among the worst.

This is the true price of a can of tuna, that lucrative shelf-stable fare that whips from the Pacific Ocean onto grocery shelves like millions of widgets flung from a slingshot. Amid rising numbers of marine observers allegedly murdered and disappeared at sea, Cagilaba’s story underscores how little words like “sustainably caught” and “certified” may mean when it comes to protecting the humans in the supply chain. And how much grocery and retail brands profit anyway.

Industry experts say that purveyors of canned tuna—major grocers like Walmart, Costco, Aldi, and Albertsons and the brands that stock their shelves—have the power to pressure tuna suppliers to ensure the safety of marine observers, not to mention fishing crews. Mostly, they don’t. In years past, that’s been because they’ve had little way of knowing when the boats they buy from are responsible for throwing observers overboard, bringing them lifeless into port after “accidents,” or harboring polluters, carrying slaves, or indulging in other kinds of human rights abuses.

Technology is now slowly making these questions answerable, however. So, too, are strategies to strengthen the laws and relationships that make such behavior unacceptable, or at least unprofitable.

As connecting problem boats to products becomes possible, advocates for at-sea workers question whether it is now just inconvenience, rather than geography or logistics, that still causes retail brands and grocers to stand aside while observers like Cagilaba are risking—and increasingly losing—their lives at sea. Whatever the reason, critics say those who earn the most money on tuna aren’t doing enough to secure the well-being of those who earn the least.

“As you go back in the supply chain, the difference in profits between what retailers make and what you see at the fishing vessel level is so vast . . . It’s almost four times more,” said Mallika Talwar, a senior oceans campaigner at Greenpeace.

Tuna brands like Bumble Bee, StarKist, and Chicken of the Sea and the grocers that sell their products anchor one end of the supply chain. Workers aboard fishing vessels and the observers entrusted to watch them are on the other. In between, “Global seafood supply chains are notoriously opaque,” said Talwar. “No one knows what’s going on there. And the companies are benefitting from that.”

Observing How Your Canned Tuna Gets Caught

So it is that island nations and states—from Papua New Guinea to Hawaii and south to New Zealand—have staked their claims to swaths of ocean in the tunas’ paths. On maps, each nation sits within its own ring. And everyone generally agrees that the rings denote each nation’s territorial seas. A smattering of treaties and agreements delineate who can fish where within the rings. And the unclaimed sea beyond is governed by regional authorities that function about as efficiently as the U.S. Congress.

Marine observers like Cagilaba are deployed in concert with the rules that nations and regional authorities make. Employed by a handful of companies and several governments, their job is to collect important data about the fish and to ensure that the people on the boats don’t pillage or pollute. Thus, marine observers are the last men and women standing between any island nation and the destructive potential of its seafaring visitors. Sometimes that’s a dangerous place to be standing.

This is where more than half of the world’s tuna supply comes from. It includes fresh-caught fish as well as canned, though the cans fuel the wealthiest actors. Canned tuna accounts for two-thirds of the $42 billion industry worldwide. The companies behind the Bumble Bee, Chicken of the Sea, and StarKist brands control the largest share of those cans. It is this multi-billion-dollar haul that entices vessels from all over the world to hunt what is arguably the largest and most lucrative wild protein supply left on Earth. But while marine observers protect the fish, there are scant protections for the observers themselves. Sometimes, the job is a little like being sent behind enemy lines to make sure that the other army plays fair.

For Cagilaba, the trip aboard the Sea Quest was one of those times. After he refused the captain’s entreaties to fudge his reports to authorities, as he later told Congress, he heard the captain on the phone, complaining loudly and falsely about him in what the captain had warned would be a call to a friend at NOAA. The captain was highly motivated to influence NOAA’s official narrative of the trip.

The plastics dumping alone was a violation of a MARPOL convention, an international treaty that spelled big trouble for any vessel. It was especially big trouble for this vessel, which had just been fined for hanging lights off the boat and into the water to cause the fish to aggregate there, a violation of another treaty between the U.S. and island nations. The dumping and the fictitious catch reports could provoke legal action, fines, and possibly criminal charges.

Inside the wheelhouse, a rough cube with windows towering high above the Sea Quest’s deck, Cagilaba could hear the captain describing him in harsh and fictitious terms. The next day, he received an email from his boss via the captain, who’d been contacted by NOAA. It read:

“Simi . . . Just to remind you that you are an observer . . . You are never to direct or make threats to anybody on board the vessel.”

Rules to Protect Marine Observers

This would be the first mandate to protect marine observers adopted by the world’s international authorities. It followed rules intended to equip observers with two-way satellite radios to give them a direct line of communication back to land. This, so they could subvert ship systems if ever they were under threat, bypassing the captain and crew. Under the measure, participating nations would also be expected to ensure that observers made it off the boat alive.

However, none of that was rule yet. Stuck aboard the Sea Quest, Cagilaba had safety gear to help him survive the water should the crew decide to throw him in. But he lacked a radio.

So, he did what he could. He sent an email through the ship’s system detailing the situation to one of his supervisors back in Fiji. It was a dangerous move—the captain could see all that he wrote. But Cagilaba wanted the opportunity to explain himself to his employer. And he wanted to get off of the Sea Quest. Still, he knew the score. The captain’s NOAA contact was a long-serving officer in the National Marine Fisheries Service, a fixture in the small enclave of South Pacific fishery regulators since at least the ‘90s. Cagilaba’s own bosses already favored the man.

That the Sea Quest was American-flagged was part of the rub. In reality, the ship was Taiwanese. So were all the officers on board, save for the captain, an American whose nationality enabled the flag. Taiwanese vessels are notoriously bad actors in these parts. An investigation of the nation’s more than 1,390 flagged and foreign operated vessels by the Environmental Justice Foundation between 2016 and 2020 would later surface charges of illegal activity on 10 percent of those boats, ranging from abusing and enslaving crews to illegal fishing and other international atrocities, like killing whales and using dolphins as bait. These were crimes that the American government was, by proxy in this scenario, now associating with.

To further complicate things, the two men whose fighting later unspooled outside Cagilaba’s cabin door were not at all his fans, thanks to his having turned them both in for violations on other trips. And because of the jurisdictional challenges of prosecuting any crime at sea—Cagilaba was a Fijian aboard an American-flagged vessel crewed by Taiwanese officers and whose fishing port was in the Marshall Islands—there was no guarantee of consequences if the Sea Quest returned to port without him.

So, Cagilaba told Congress later, he stayed up most of that night and every other night after, sleeping during lulls in the fishing during the day while the crew was kept sober and busy. Days passed.

Challenges with the U.S. Approach to Illegal Seafood

“In Europe, the retailers over the last 10 years have evolved in a different way,” said Daniel Suddaby, vice president at the international nonprofit Ocean Outcomes, which promotes healthy ocean ecosystems, fishing communities, and plentiful and profitable seafood. “Most will have a team of three to four quite qualified and experienced marine scientist advocates who really understand the issues. And they will engage in it in more of a deep, meaningful, and careful way. It’s not to say there isn’t a ton of risk in the supply chain in Europe.”

The purchasing risks he describes come with responsibilities. Businesses that import seafood are legally required to undertake due diligence to ensure they’re not buying illegal catch. They also have to be able to demonstrate the steps they take to ensure the legal purchase.

Those steps support port inspectors, whose job is to check catch certificates supplied by foreign exporters. Regular audits assess whether the countries that import seafood to the European Union—there’s an approved list—are honoring agreements to keep illegal catch out of their exports. Problem nations are graded with yellow and red cards that help businesses understand where the greatest risks lie when they’re buying seafood from abroad. When they improve, those colors switch to green.

In the U.S., there’s no such framework. Instead, port inspectors are the only bulwark against all illegal catch. The U.S. does have a Seafood Import Monitoring Program, but the regulators that oversee it don’t often issue information that helps businesses understand purchasing risk. Brands that import seafood face no legal liability if they buy illegal catch. Neither do retailers. In short, there is little incentive to do anything more than shrug about widely known abuses of fishing and humanitarian rules.

Some American importers are interested in trying to resist illegal fare anyway, especially more boutique retailers that serve a more socially conscious shopper. But the marketplace doesn’t make it easy. Huw Thomas, a seafood industry consultant for Global Fishing Watch, says that to really assess the sustainability and human rights record of a product, “there’s 200 data sets that a business would need to know. It’s beyond their capabilities to get their arms around it.” Retailers also stock tens of thousands of products, and struggle to prioritize what to check.

But retailers do have power. Lots of it, though the weight of the lucrative end of the supply chain has not been brought to bear on better regulations, frameworks, and accountability for tuna suppliers. It’s a fact that allows bad actors to fish as profitably as the vast majority of those who follow the rules, if not more so.

What’s more, the brands that rule the cans—StarKist, Chicken of the Sea, Bumble Bee—are all following the lead of the U.S.’s largest grocers. Those brands have all been purchased by Asian companies since 2000. Bumble Bee was bought by Fong Chun Formosa Fishery Company, Ltd. (FCF) of Kaoshiung, Taiwan, in 2021; StarKist by Dongwon Group of Seoul and Busan, South Korea, in 2008; and Chicken of the Sea was fully acquired by Thai Union Group of Samut Sakhon, Thailand, in 2000. As each company has reorganized its leadership, sustainability commitments have shifted.

Chicken of the Sea has continued some efforts. The company has a vessel code of conduct program, and it said in a statement that it is engaged in third-party audits of its supply chain. Its leadership has joined the boards of other organizations aimed at reducing illegal fishing and human rights abuses. It’s also made commitments to source all of its tuna from monitored vessels, either human or otherwise, and to reduce fishery bycatch, though the deadlines for meeting those goals are still ahead.

Illustration credit: Tina Zellmer

At Bumble Bee, however, trends toward cleaning up the supply chain have reversed course, with its former sustainability targets ratcheted downward since its FCF buyout. Bumble Bee did not respond to requests for comment about these issues. StarKist also did not respond to a request for comment about its efforts to combat illegal seafood and human rights abuses. “These companies are super sensitive to what the retailers are asking,” said Suddaby. And yet, he adds: “Some of the big retailers in the U.S. have limited understandings of the sustainability issues.”

This is why many large U.S. retailers default to third-party certifiers like the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) instead of staffing or partnering with qualified, experienced marine science advocates. “What would really be supportive for sustainability, as well as the MSC push, is having the big retailers say to FCF, ‘You need to greatly increase observer coverage,’” said Suddaby.

Instead, MSC certifies seafood to environmental standards. It is seen as better than nothing by advocates. But it lacks clear human rights standards, even though its certifications depend on the work of marine observers, as well as the work of the crews that catch the fish. The approach hasn’t worked to defend against human rights abuses. In the last seven years, Human Rights at Sea (HRAS) found, four observers have gone missing from or died suspiciously aboard four different vessels that were authorized to fish MSC-certified tuna by regional authorities. A fifth observer had also disappeared from a vessel in 2010. His remains were later recovered—his legs and body bound by chains.

In a statement, MSC’s head of social policy, Oluyemisi Oloruntuyi, stressed that the organization certifies only fisheries, not the boats that catch MSC fish, which are determined by regional fisheries authorities. Two of the boats on which observers died never did fish MSC catch, despite having permission to, according to the statement. And MSC questions the motivations behind the  report, which HRAS discloses was funded by World Wise Foods. World Wise Foods shares a chairman with the International Pole and Line Foundation, an organization that promotes competing sectors and is a historic critic of the fishery, and sources tuna from a commercial competitor.

Such hair-splitting statements effectively allow MSC to avoid accountability for the challenges faced by observers, but they are hallmarks of the global tuna industry. And while the Sea Quest was fishing conventional—not MSC—tuna at the time, this is the marketplace that Cagilaba was working in while under threat and under-slept aboard the Sea Quest in 2015.

Certain of the dangers, he hastened to get off at the next port. His supervisors had already told him to stay on board via email. But once the Sea Quest docked in the Marshall Islands, Cagilaba quickly made contact with the observer coordinator for the Ministry of Fisheries. He tried again to relay his unease about the fudged catch reports, the threats from the captain, and the captain’s call to the American official who’d relayed the fictitious narrative of the trip to his bosses. The coordinator downplayed Cagilaba’s account, according to Cagilaba’s statements to Congress. Then he told him to get back on the boat.

Later, Cagilaba learned that the coordinator was friends with the Sea Quest’s agent, another cog in a shaky wheel, rattled by corruption. Once told to get back aboard, he knew his report would be buried. And that if he didn’t make it known soon, somehow, he was unlikely to get off the Sea Quest alive.

‘Retailer Apathy’ for Addressing Marine Observer Safety

According to the survey of American observers by NOAA Fisheries, among the 46 percent who said they had been harassed at sea, most were either dissatisfied or nonplussed by the experience of reporting it. Nearly 60 percent of those who made reports said there was no response. And some feared the repercussions of saying anything: fewer deployments, assignments back to problem vessels. “Some respondents mentioned that most of time they handled situations on their own, since they felt that some observer program staff would not take their reports seriously,” the survey found.

The extent to which officials in observer programs and oversight agencies were being co-opted into the dark underworld of tuna—and how often tuna brands play along—would become better understood in 2020. That’s the year that Eritara Aati Kaierua, a fishery observer from Kiribati, was brought ashore lifeless by a Taiwanese purse seiner, the Win Far 636, after a tuna fishing trip off the coast of Nauru.

Kaierua should have been protected under the new WCPFC mandate for observer safety. But while working as part of a special project to certify tuna for MSC, he was found dead in one of the boat’s cabins. An autopsy later conducted in Fiji found he had died from a blow to the head. Local authorities next opened a murder investigation, but it has never concluded.

“We initially heard that it was homicide. Then seven months later, we heard of a second opinion that changed the cause of death to natural causes due to hypertension,” Nicky Kaierua, his sister, said in an email. She added that she has seen the initial autopsy report on her brother and is confident that hypertension didn’t cause his death. That word—hypertension—has now been used to explain two other observer deaths, and families of observers missing and murdered in the Pacific have come together in grief to note their experiences with its use.

Some charge that authorities are unmotivated to resolve such cases in countries that are economically dependent on fishing, or reluctant to take a tough stance on all crimes at sea. Tuna accounts for a substantial share of jobs in the Pacific Islands and an often-larger share of public spending. In Kiribati, for example, tuna revenues fuel 63 percent of the national budget. The geopolitics and jurisdictional mayhem involved with prosecuting crimes aboard foreign fishing vessels, or involving citizens from other countries or both, also don’t make it easy.

Meanwhile, Nicky Kaierua said, “My brother’s ‘unsolved’ death has had devastating impacts on our family.” Like many observers, Kaierua was his family’s breadwinner, supporting a wife and four children who have had little financial support since he died. “Fisheries observers are often forewarned that the job is risky. They are also told that the position comes with good pay because of the risk that comes with it. My brother earned 60 Australian dollars a day. Should we be lenient on their safety because they get a little bit extra?”

According to the investigation by Human Rights at Sea, after the Win Far 636 brought Kaierua’s body back to port, it took regional authorities another 38 days to suspend the boat’s certificate to fish in the MSC program. MSC later emphasized that its certification was an environmental standard, not a human rights one, in a statement, which noted that it took steps to assure that no catch from the vessel entered the supply chain as MSC-certified.

APO has since recommended that programs like MSC have criteria that protect observers and processes that gauge whether those programs work. APO has also pressed the international community to outlaw observer harassment globally and document observer deaths for the public.

In response to such critiques, the MSC introduced new requirements in October 2022 that “entities involved in unacceptable conduct inclusive of mistreatment of crew and fisheries observers must be removed from MSC certificates.” It also gave $137,000 toward the development of communications technology and a review of observer programs in April 2021. But those changes won’t impact the Win Far 636. In July 2022, after no criminal charges were filed in Kaierua’s death, the boat was again certified to fish MSC tuna through 2025.

Observer advocates admit that blacklisting problem boats and companies can sometimes backfire anyway, making space for other bad actors. Most believe the best response to human rights abuses would be for grocers to use their market heft to directly push their suppliers toward better practices, moving the whole market. Among retailers that use MSC as a proxy for examining supply chains, however, that conversation isn’t happening, at least not publicly.

Costco declined to comment for this article. Neither Albertsons, Walmart, nor Aldi responded to requests for interviews or comments. And it’s this distinctive indifference, an overall lack of action, that critics describe as most problematic, an institutional buck-passing that is a defining characteristic of the tuna marketplace.

“You can call it retailer apathy,” said Talwar of Greenpeace. In its own survey of tuna retailers, Greenpeace found that only five of 16 of the largest retailers that sell tuna took specific steps to advocate for observer protections. Among those, most had only gone as far as to formally encourage observer programs to work together toward an International Observer Bill of Rights. In evaluating tuna retailers overall, Talwar said, “They’re far behind anything that we would expect from companies that are in this business.”

Most large retailers just return to the same big cans. They buy from StarKist, Chicken of the Sea, and Bumble Bee, primarily, and acquiesce to whatever supply-chain due-diligence the brands provide. In its investigation of Kaierua’s death, Human Rights at Sea found that it was most likely Bumble Bee’s parent company, FCF, that bought the tuna from the ill-fated voyage. It wasn’t the first time that suspected illegal fishing was found in the Bumble Bee supply chain. In March 2023, Bumble Bee agreed to remove the terms “fair and safe supply chain” and “fair and responsible working conditions” from its website, social media, and advertising for a decade after being sued by a labor rights group for allegedly violating consumer protection laws by claiming them.

But not much, otherwise, has changed. The Win Far 636, while it continues fishing, is just as connected to the tuna marketplace as ever, one of 27 vessels owned by a consortium of companies that delivers its MSC catch to FCF for canning for Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea, among other brands. Then there’s that other vessel, the Sea Quest. At the time of Cagilaba’s voyage, it was owned by a company run by a prominent group of tuna executives, including those with ties to Chicken of the Sea, Mitsui, and headed by FCF president, Max Chou. A spokesman for the company declined to comment, citing corporate policy.

Technology, Policy, and Consumer Pressure for Change

That report later led to an investigation that, like that of Kaierua’s death, went nowhere. Then the Sea Quest also disappeared. Records show it was renamed Joe Turner, sold to a new owner in the Philippines, and now fishes tuna for a seafood company that charters it from Papua New Guinea. Nambawan Seafoods PNG Limited is one of FCF’s many partners in the region.

It is common for formal inquiries like Cagilaba’s to be abandoned, languishing in a state of perpetual unresolve, and for problem boats to vanish into the opacity of the tuna supply chain, while issues aboard go unresolved. Yet a combination of technology, policy, and consumer pressure on suppliers could actually keep the problem from happening in the first place.

Most people working for brands and retailers know this. But none were willing to go on record to talk about an effort that’s now underway to connect the fish they sell with whatever happens on the boats when it’s caught.

That work—called the SCRP, or Supply Chain Risk Project—is being led by a trifecta of institutions adept at using technology and data to track illegal fishing. They include Global Fishing Watch, which creates and shares knowledge about human activity at sea; the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions, which leads research and innovation involving oceans; and FishWise, which works with companies to address environmental and humanitarian goals in seafood supply chains. Hosted by the World Economic Forum, the three are steeped in a massive data project that can help retailers check a supplier’s word. And maybe twist their arm.

The data comes from global tracking devices that use transceivers on ships, called AIS or Automatic Identification System, that are required aboard vessels and can be tracked by satellite and analyzed by the likes of Global Fishing Watch. To watch a vessel through AIS is to understand where it is in the ocean, when it ports and anchors, and when it’s making the kinds of maneuvers associated with fishing. It’s possible to use that data to see, say, when a boat is fishing in a marine protected area. Or when a vessel’s beacon shuts off right outside of one.

Such systems don’t eliminate the need for observers, even when paired with cameras aboard boats. Fisheries scientists maintain that having a human presence at least 20 percent of the time is still critical to guaranteeing that the science underpinning stock assessments that guide fishing are accurate. Observers also collect a lot of other information—details about the age of the fish caught, and ratios of males to females, for example—that help set the rules about what fish can be caught where.

That said, digital oversight that can command better practices is increasingly possible, if not imminent. Some private sector companies that use blockchain to collect data at various points along the supply chain, such as Wholechain, say they are already close to pinpointing vessels tied to observer deaths and other human rights abuses. Whether that oversight someday comes with consumer-facing tools that assure customers a safe supply chain is up to the companies. But it’s now conceivable. And that’s no small thing.

Details about which corporations’ data is powering the SCRP’s test drive are top secret and, again, none of the major tuna brands or grocers—Aldi, Walmart, Costco, Albertsons, Bumble Bee, StarKist, and Chicken of the Sea—would comment on the effort to daylight the seafood supply chain, or say whether they’re involved. Right now, it is being funded by philanthropists.

The fact that some retailers are indeed in the mix, even behind the scenes, is likely good news for Cagilaba’s ilk, who had no such potential ally back in 2015. It’s unclear who bought the catch from his harrowing trip, to what market it flew, or where in the world it landed. But it’s clear that the answers to those questions would allow people on one end of the supply chain to bolster the safety for those on the other end.

For Cagilaba, back in Fiji, safety was a relative term. He was fired within months, while the NOAA investigation of his rough tour aboard the Sea Quest was still underway. It took six months for NOAA’s law enforcement to interview him. And as far as he could tell later, the only result was an early retirement.

“It made me realize that some government officials from the Pacific island countries are overly familiar with the fishing company personnel and their boat agents and have been compromised, making our jobs as fisheries observers impossible and dangerous,” he wrote in testimony to Congress later.

Cagilaba eventually moved to America, became a criminal investigator first, and then a lawyer. No more boisterous drunks in the night, captains that could order him thrown into the sea, or employers who wouldn’t prevent it.

It’s too late for 13 of his colleagues who have died since 2014. It may not be too late for the rest.

Ofani Eremae contributed reporting.

This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network and the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources.

The post The True Cost of Tuna: Marine Observers Dying at Sea appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2023/01/11/kristin-ohlson-sweet-in-tooth-and-claw-cooperation-collaboration-nature/ Wed, 11 Jan 2023 09:00:46 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=50155 In Sweet In Tooth And Claw, author Kristin Ohlson explores cooperative relationships found in nature, from the evolution of the multicellular creatures that form the building blocks of all life to relationships between co-evolving plants and insects and their intersection with humans. Ohlson is an Oregon-based writer whose last book, The Soil Will Save Us, […]

The post Kristin Ohlson Wants Us to Reimagine Collaboration on the Land appeared first on Civil Eats.

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Much thinking about the natural world is shaped by neo-Darwinism, an assumed struggle for survival on a planet where humans prevail over other species. But what if humans are not simply the apex predator, selfishly driven to devour the environment, destroy habitats, and dominate other creatures? What if they are instead the ultimate cooperators, ensconced in a system of mutually beneficial relationships, wielders of a unique power to uplift the natural world?

In Sweet In Tooth And Claw, author Kristin Ohlson explores cooperative relationships found in nature, from the evolution of the multicellular creatures that form the building blocks of all life to relationships between co-evolving plants and insects and their intersection with humans.

Ohlson is an Oregon-based writer whose last book, The Soil Will Save Us, became a bestseller that popularized the notion of improved soil management as a climate solution. She later appeared in the similarly themed, award-winning documentary Kiss the Ground. With Sweet In Tooth and Claw, she challenges the notion that humans are meant to dominate and control their  environmental, and invites readers to reimagine them as key collaborators instead.

With expansive thinking and in relatable prose, she tours mutualistic experiments like a Nevada rangeland reinvigorated by beavers and a Mexican coffee plantation shaded by bird habitat, explaining research that makes a case for more such invention. Civil Eats recently sat down with Ohlson to discuss the book, and what she learned is possible when people see themselves as integral parts of the ecosystems in which they live.

There’s a great passage in your book about humanity’s narrative of itself. It’s about how metaphors of constant struggle and greed have become a dark lens that cause people see humans as the apex predator of the planet, and life as “a zero-sum game in which a benefit for one is a loss for another.” Are we the apex predator?

We have the ability to be the apex predator. I was just reading another author the other day who made the point that other creatures, especially big fauna, exist because we let them. We could so easily wipe them out. But if we unleash that power—and we certainly do way too often—it leaves us with a world in which the biology around us just dies off bit by bit. We are biological creatures. We’re not something that came out of a box on a factory shelf. If we did survive in a world where all the rest of the biology was denuded, I don’t think it would be the world we want.

Your book posits that humans are part of mutualistic relationships that sustain species through cooperation. Can you explain what a mutualism is?

A mutualism is a mutually beneficial relationship among two or more species. One that most people encounter every day, at least the one that we’re aware of, is that between pollinators and plants. But mutualisms go on constantly in every ecosystem. Scientists will say probably every living thing on earth engages in a mutualism—they can’t say all because they haven’t tested every single one. But I think it’s probably fair to say that there is no organism that doesn’t have some kind of mutualism going.

“We have the ability to be the apex predator. We could so easily wipe [other creatures] out. But if we unleash that power—and we certainly do way too often—it leaves us with a world in which the biology around us just dies off bit by bit. . . . I don’t think it would be the world we want.”

We have thousands, millions, of mutualisms with all those things that live in us and on us. Everything around us is engaged with everything else constantly, both in ways that we’re aware of, like with bees and flowers, and in ways that we’re not aware of, like what’s happening underground with the roots of plants and how they interact with fungi and bacteria and protozoa and small animals in the ground. It’s going on constantly right underneath our feet.

Can you give some examples of mutualistic relationships that humans have?

Well, there’s everything that lives in our gut—bacteria. And also things that live on our skin. And—this is somewhat different—but humans also have mutualistic relationships with each other. That’s what a city is. A city is a vast expanse of people doing different things that help other people survive.

It makes a big difference if we carry this idea around in our heads that all life is competition and conflict instead of held together by cooperation from the basic cells up. All the cells that we are composed of, those single-celled organisms, came into existence about 3.8 billion years ago. They sort of floated around in this world until around 1.8 billion years ago, when a new kind of cell formed. Then one swallowed the other, and it created a more internally complex organism. It’s called a eukaryote.

All humans, all animals, all plants, all fungi are made of these eukaryotic cells. They have the internal complexity that form relationships with other cells. That act of cooperation and connection is at the basis of all multicellular life. I think that’s a big deal.

How long have scientists known about mutualisms?

The first one that I know of would be in 1886. That was the Dutch microbiologists Martinus Beijerinck. He found that on the roots of certain plants, nodules formed that bacteria live inside and they are fixing atmospheric nitrogen. Basically, they are turning it into fertilizer.

If we were to take what’s been learned about mutualisms and redevelop policy around it, how would agriculture be different?

I think things really are changing a lot. Some of the things that the Biden Administration is considering is exciting stuff. At least the ideas are floating around. But we really could take these ideas and go with them.

If we did, you would never drive down a highway and see miles and miles of bare soil that sits out there for six months a year waiting to be planned for spring. It damages the life in the soil. You would always see a winter cover crop over that.

And what some of the most innovative farmers are now doing is having a couple of crops in the same field or having a cover crop that is also a market crop. They’re using their animals in those fields. All of that would look so much different. Visually, it would be a completely different look.

I’m always fascinated when I’m flying someplace and look down and see the dramatic engineering of the landscape because of modern agriculture. When you see those circles, it’s because there’s an irrigation pivot in the middle. If farmers were using cover crops, they would need so much less water because they wouldn’t lose so much of it to evaporation. We wouldn’t see naked soil like that anymore.

Can you talk about an example of innovation that’s more mutualistic?

One coffee plantation and the farm in Costa Rica is an example of how incredible a place can be when maximizing production is not the only goal. The goal of that coffee plantation is both to raise coffee and also to have habitat that birds flourish in.

“What some of the most innovative farmers are now doing is having a couple of crops in the same field or having a cover crop that is also a market crop. They’re using their animals in those fields. All of that [makes agriculture] look so much different.”

Coffee is an understory plant. That’s how it was first discovered in Africa. For years and years, it was grown in the shade. Then, because of the threat of rust, which is a fungal pest, the U.S. and some of the big agricultural companies pushed coffee growers to grow coffee in a monoculture in the bright sun and lose the services of all those other plants. This way, they would lose the shading services and the services of insects that would live in more varied plantations. And instead, they would have to deploy a lot of chemicals and lot more water. But the idea was that they wouldn’t get rust as easily. I don’t think that has proven to be true.

On the plantation that I visited, scientists are documenting all the relationships among all the different insects and fungi and things that live in that varied plantation. There are not only many varieties of shade trees that coffee grow under and around, but all these other trees that owners planted there to try to feed birds. People who aren’t planting in that way have to take care of those pests some way. There, the birds are taking care of it. And the really intricate dynamics, even between different fungal species, also take care of pests.

Did you talk with producers and growers about the barriers to engaging in this type of system? What is it that stops people from farming this way?

There are a bunch of things that stop people from ranching or raising crops or having orchards in a regenerative way. One of the main things is one of the most surprising things: It’s what their neighbors think.

A regenerative farm looks “messy.” There’s all this stuff growing between market crop, and they’re not spraying their edges to kill off weeds. If they’re really smart—and they are really smart—they’re letting stands of wildflowers grow so that birds and insects come in. And it doesn’t have that neat-as-a-pin look.

In these small farming communities, not only do their neighbors talk, but their bankers talk, their landowners talk. An awful lot of farmers are renting land from landowners who live out of town or maybe live in town and don’t understand why their farm looks so messy. That’s really a big thing—the expectation of what it’s supposed to look like.

It’s very difficult, given our farm policy, for farmers to be creative and not just do the cookie-cutter approach to farming that suggests heavy tillage, heavy chemical use, and high-tech seed use. They’re all getting loans at the beginning of every farming season, and it’s hard to convince a banker to support you if you are doing something that’s different and creative. It’s hard to get crop insurance if you’re doing something different and creative. And bankers don’t want to give loans to people who aren’t getting crop insurance.

“It’s very difficult, given our farm policy, for farmers to be creative and not just do the cookie-cutter approach to farming that suggests heavy tillage, heavy chemical use, and high-tech seed use. . . . It’s hard to convince a banker to support you if you are doing something that’s different and creative.”

Also, most of our ag education system is following that industrial-ag paradigm of heavy tillage, heavy chemical use, and high-tech seed use. For farmers who want to do it differently, where is the lesson plan? Where are the examples? Examples proliferate in YouTube videos—it’s not that it doesn’t exist anywhere—but it pales in comparison. The teaching and support for people doing regenerative agriculture is just a fraction of the support and education of people doing it the industrial way.

Regenerative ag is not a concept that the USDA has always embraced. In fact, there was a period where they were kind of against it. Can you give us some background on that? And is it changing? 

We can all be so hidebound. Nobody wants to change, especially when you’re part of a huge bureaucracy. And I think especially when big government agencies like the USDA have to answer to politicians who answer to big funders. There was a lot of foot-dragging in the USDA and there still is, I imagine, around such questions as GMOs and chemicals in farming.

But it really is changing. When my soil book first came out [in 2014], one of the first people I heard from was a guy who was in the media department for the Natural Resources Conservation Service. They had this whole movement around soil, a huge push. They were really trying to convince farmers around the country to stop tilling and to use cover crops. And I think they probably would have loved to have told them not to use chemicals or to use fewer of them, but that was a tougher thing to get away with given the bureaucracy.

Scientist Jonathan Lundgren was operating within that bureaucracy at that time, working with soy and corn. He is an entomologist so he is really interested in finding natural ways that farmers could fight against the pests that plague crops. A lot of his research was showing that these miracle chemicals that the chemical companies were trying to sell to farmers, that would take care of this pest and that pest, they weren’t really helping at all. That’s when he really had his difficulties with the USDA and left.

Can you talk a little more about Jonathan Lundgren’s efforts to support new ways of farming?

He’s doing a lot of science, a lot of study, comparing regenerative farms and conventional farms and seeing really who is doing better. That one paper that he published right as I was writing this book compared conventional farms to regenerative farms and looked to see who is doing better. And it was the regenerative farms.

Their yields were not as high, but they weren’t spending tons of money on chemicals. And they were able to stack enterprises. So they had crops going, and when those crops were done, their animals would come through and eat the residue. This meant they had meat to sell from the same piece of land that another farmer would only be able to sell his corn or his soy from.

What was your takeaway after learning all of this?

If we have this idea that everything is competition and conflict, and that’s our guiding metaphor for what life is like, then we’re really missing the bigger part of the story, which is that life has been formed and is held together by these cooperative relationships, these mutualisms.

So when we look at a city—I had my window broken out yesterday. If we have this view of the world that everything is competition and conflict, well there’s just another sign of it. But if we have the view that really cities are these vast cooperative structures, but then stuff screws up every now and then, it’s a different view. It’s more fixable; it’s more workable. We are less likely to throw up our hands in despair if we think of it as we’re one of the most cooperative species that’s ever been.

Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari is among those who’ve said that humans are massively cooperative, and that is why we’re so deadly. We can organize ourselves around great causes. And sometimes the great cause is a really terrible one, like the Nazis.

But on the other hand, we can make the case that we can organize this very cooperative species around another great cause, which is repairing our relationship with the rest of nature. What excites me is that when people do figure out how we have been causing damage, and how we can pull back that damage, the rest of nature responds so quickly. Things regenerate in really powerful and unexpected ways.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/06/13/the-us-is-a-dumping-ground-for-illegal-seafood-some-lawmakers-want-to-clean-up-the-market/ Mon, 13 Jun 2022 08:00:31 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=46981 Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared last month in The Deep Dish, our members-only monthly newsletter. Become a member today to get early and exclusive access to our in-depth reporting on food and the environment. In March, a grand jury indicted the CEO of American Eel Depot, a New Jersey company, along with […]

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]]> Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared last month in The Deep Dish, our members-only monthly newsletter. Become a member today to get early and exclusive access to our in-depth reporting on food and the environment.

In the end, the eels were worth an estimated $160 million. Over four years, they trickled through U.S. seaports in 138 shipping containers that eight people were later accused of importing illegally.

In March, a grand jury indicted the CEO of American Eel Depot, a New Jersey company, along with three members of the staff and four business affiliates in association with the alleged crimes. U.S. attorneys charged that the eels—packaged and labeled as unagi—were illegally harvested as juveniles in Europe and Asia, then shipped around the world to disguise their origins. They were raised to adulthood in a Chinese fish farm and sent to the United States as purportedly legal fare.

Those 138 shipping containers represent just a tiny portion of the illegal seafood that is sold in America annually. According to a report by the U.S. International Trade Commission, illegal seafood accounted for $2.4 billion in sales in 2019, or nearly 11 percent of $22 billion in seafood imports that year. Should the allegations against American Eel Depot prove true, nabbing them is a coup for federal investigators, a rare win in an oft-elusive struggle to slow the speed of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) seafood coming through U.S. ports in huge volumes. It has been a problem for years, but legislation currently in Congress aims to advance efforts to curtail it.

“IUU fishing really undermines all of the progress the U.S. and other countries around the world have made in trying to more sustainably manage their fisheries to ensure that we have fish forever,” said Beth Lowell, who oversees campaigns to deter illegal fishing at the environmental nonprofit Oceana. “That’s of course important because of food security, coastal economies, and people rely on these fisheries for jobs but also for food.”

Lowell describes IUU this way: fishing without a permit, ignoring catch limits, fishing in restricted areas where marine wildlife is harmed or habitat destroyed, or fishing where there’s no regulation or reporting at all.

“Illegal fishing really undermines all of the progress the U.S. and other countries around the world have made in trying to more sustainably manage their fisheries to ensure that we have fish forever.”

The United States already restricts such abuse in its domestic fisheries. Ecologically speaking, they are among the most tightly regulated in the world, and national labor laws prevent the forced labor issues often tied to seafood elsewhere. But fishermen working in the U.S. regularly compete against ill-gotten—and often cheaper—imports. In 2016, the nation began implementing the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) to help change that. SIMP creates a paper trail for certain seafood imports and tracks those fish from the docks, through distributors, and then to buyers. That documentation aids law enforcement and deters the sort of scheme prosecutors say American Eel Depot devised.

The SIMP, however, only targets 13 species groups. They’re the most frequently imported and illegally or mislabeled seafood in America—including tuna, shrimp, and Atlantic cod—but they represent only 45 percent of the nation’s seafood imports.

New legislation introduced last year by U.S. Representatives Jared Huffman (D-California) and Garret Graves (R-Louisiana) could expand the rules to all imported seafood, requiring importers to keep records about where fish were harvested and landed, and the chain of custody before they arrive in ports. The expansion would net hundreds of other species. The legislation also proposes to expand data requirements, establish seafood labeling, and beef up enforcement.

After initially stalling, the proposal became separate iterations of new bills in the House and Senate. The most viable is now the America COMPETES Act, which mostly pertains to manufacturing and has the best chance of becoming law, though both the House and Senate have passed versions of the bills. Efforts to reconcile both are now underway, but efforts to combat IUU fishing generally have strong bipartisan support in America—five of the last six presidential administrations supported efforts to keep IUU seafood out of the country. This latest effort has so far been hailed as a success by environmental and labor advocates. It also has support from domestic fishers and others in the seafood industry.

An Uneven Playing Field

Nathan Rickard is one such supporter. Rickard is an attorney who specializes in trade remedies for the Southern Shrimp Alliance. Right now, his is a big job. Eighty-five percent of seafood in America is imported, ripe for the illicit finfare that ends up in grocery stores, restaurants, and prepared foods. Rickard says shrimp make up 27 percent of those imports, which makes it hard for domestic shrimpers to make an honest living while they compete with cheaper, illegally gotten products. Every day for 19 years, Rickard has helped them push back against this illegal tide. And that’s how much effort it takes: every day for 19 years.

When something shows up at the border, he says, the ability to trace it back to the pond or boat that it came from “is going to be incredibly helpful in putting a measure of accountability in this industry,” he said.

Expanding the SIMP could make it easier, for example, to track imports from nations including China, India, Thailand, and Vietnam, which pay duties on certain shrimp products to make sure they don’t skirt the rules. Those duties help keep the playing field level with countries like China, which have given subsidies to shrimp producers, enabling them to land cheap shrimp in the U.S. market, bottoming out prices for domestic shrimpers.

A Shrimp Boat At Sunrise In the Gulf of Mexico

Those domestic shrimpers fish in small boats between the southeast tip of Texas and the outer banks of North Carolina. Their catch is capped to ensure the health of the species. They are also required to use technology that keeps turtles from being ensnared in their gear and to abide by a host of other rules the National Marine Fishery Service decrees. Those fishers’ landings are closely monitored to ensure compliance, and domestic fishing is also overseen by marine biologists that often ride aboard vessels, collecting data on fishing practices and the health of various species.

But those shrimpers must compete with Gulf shrimpers from Mexico, who don’t have comparable catch limits, have differing labor requirements, and aren’t required to turtle-proof their gear. And some of the farmed shrimp they’re competing against from abroad can not only harm mangroves and other sensitive ecosystems, it can also be tank-farmed in nations that do not regulate antibiotics or chemical use. Chinese aquaculture, for example, can often be identified simply by testing it for antibiotic residue, Rickard said.

“Those companies just disappear the moment that anybody comes knocking or looks into stuff. That shouldn’t happen with food products.”

Eyeing the proposed legislation, he added, “There are so many different things about the law that are promising going forward.” As one example, he pointed to a provision that would require all seafood importers to have an International Fisheries Trade Permit.

“On all the shrimp trade fraud that we were facing, it was these . . . fly-by-night companies that would just open and start importing huge amounts of stuff in the U.S. They were operating out of post office boxes, FedEx boxes,” Rickard said. “Those companies just disappear the moment that anybody comes knocking or looks into stuff. That shouldn’t happen with food products.”

If all seafood importers were required to apply for permits, that address data could direct investigations of those fly-by-night companies, including of forced labor associated with illegal seafood.

Environmental groups echo a need for collecting basic information about all seafood from importers: Noting what type of fish was caught or raised, and where and how the fishermen or farmer was licensed, can help the National Marine Fishery Service use that information to identify the highest-risk shipments and more effectively target scofflaws. Maybe somebody reported they caught a fish where it isn’t found; maybe they described a license that doesn’t exist; or maybe they fished somewhere where the season was closed. Expanding SIMP could help punish these abuses—and discourage people from continuing to skirt the law.

Loopholes, Reimports Pose a Challenge

As long as there are loopholes—for species, for nations—schemes that evade such tracking are ongoing and bedeviling. And they’re increasingly an American problem: The European Union is adopting tougher laws, and Canada, Japan, and Mexico are making progress toward tighter borders, while the United States is becoming the world’s dumping ground for illegally caught seafood.

Consider that unagi from American Eel Depot, for example. U.S. attorneys say it was illegally harvested by fishers in The Netherlands and Ukraine, where juvenile eels, called elvers, are endangered. In an indictment, those fishers were described as part of “a multi-billion dollar international black market for freshwater eels” that flourishes around the globe. Eels are a popular sushi ingredient, but due to their complex biology, they can’t be bred in captivity, only reared there.

Traditional eel fisherman Peter Carter holds an eel at first light near Outwell, England.

In the indictment, American Eel Depot is charged with making deposits to foreign bank accounts for payment to the fishers who shipped elvers to American Eel contacts in Thailand and Hong Kong, at points mislabeling them as live crabs and scrubbing the shipping papers of any mention of the company. Some ended up at a facility in China, the indictment says, where they were reared to adulthood and processed. By the time they made it to the U.S., American Eel Depot was allegedly labeling them as American and telling the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as much.

That would have been legit—if it were true: Eels are endangered in Europe and Japan, but not in Maine. Fishermen there fetch as much as $2,000 a pound for some of the only legally harvestable eels in the world. And because 20 percent of the 85 percent of seafood that is imported annually to the U.S. market is actually “reimported” (meaning caught in America but processed overseas), those eels could have been American. Similar reimport issues affect salmon, tunas, and a host of other seafood species often processed in China. Disguising illegal fare as American also greatly muddies enforcement of protections for endangered species.

The Cost of Making Gains

Not everybody welcomes tighter rules, however. For example, the seafood education nonprofit National Fisheries Institute, along with a coalition of seafood businesses, sued the Obama administration after the administration began implementing the SIMP in 2016. At the time, the litigants argued that the National Marine Fisheries Service lacked the authority to regulate seafood fraud and made a number of errors in implementing the program. A federal court upheld the SIMP a year later, but the group maintained that it would cost American companies $53 million in record-keeping and boost the price of seafood for consumers. The litigants included companies from the middle of the seafood supply chain, like restaurant chains and seafood processors who buy imports for sale to grocery stores, restaurants and consumers.

“Seafood traceability helps all branches in the supply chain, from the fishermen all the way to the final point of sale. Right now we put a lot of pressure on the individual consumer to make choices on what seafood they’re going to buy.”

This opaque middle—a place where products change hands frequently—is also tough to track. Oceana’s Lowell said the proposed legislation would trace fish through that space, where it would ultimately prevent mislabeling for grocers, restaurants and consumers.

“Seafood traceability helps all branches in the supply chain, from the fishermen all the way to the final point of sale, because it gives you a chain of custody of the product throughout the supply chain,” she said. “Right now we put a lot of pressure on the individual consumer to make choices on what seafood they’re going to buy. If you had built-in assurances that at least what you were getting was legally caught, I think that would be good for both the end seller and the end buyer.”

At FishWise, a nonprofit that helps seafood companies respond to environmental and social supply chain issues, that notion also gets support, as do plans in the proposed legislation that would synchronize the government’s ability to respond to labor violations in the seafood supply chain. The legislation proposes to formally expand the definition of IUU fishing under U.S. law to include human trafficking, forced labor, and labor rights violations, which would enable critical government entities and law enforcement to work more cohesively to combat them. It would also increase data requirements in documenting labor conditions and expand the authority of the U.S. to revoke port privileges from boats associated with IUU fishing.

“We would like labor and legal harvest to be taken together, if possible,” said Sara Lewis, who directs the traceability division at FishWise. “We’re not shifting regulatory authority as much as we’re allowing for better communication and better coordination of tools and strategies to address both of those things.”

She said the effort would greatly ease the burden for companies that would like to improve on both within their supply chains, which right now requires doubling up on efforts to address the problems separately.

“It makes sense that a product could not be legally harvested if it was harvested using forced or other coerced labor,” Lewis added.

Should the legislation pass—it is likely to be voted on again this session—Lewis and others foresee more work ahead, navigating a future of advanced data tools that help forecast risk and monitor crews at sea. Advocates suggest that, if it passes, there will also likely need to be efforts to adequately fund the implementation of any SIMP expansion and urging the National Marine Fisheries Service to use SIMP data to target investigations, rather than the standardized audits of the past. Grocers, restaurants, and seafood producers are also likely to be drawn into conversations about labeling and transparency as more data about seafood sourcing becomes available.

“We’re making a lot of progress in the conversation,” Lewis said. “The NGO community, the industry, and the government are not as far apart as one might think; we’re actually all moving toward a common set of issues.”

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