With nearly 50,000 registered fishing vessels, Thailand has one of the world’s largest fishing fleets. But the Thai government admits this figure is merely an estimate of the number of Thai boats plying the seas. “Ghost boats” – unlicensed replicas of properly registered and licensed boats – make up as much as half of Thailand’s true fishing fleet, according to a 2011 International Organisation for Migration report.
Boat managers, captains and fishermen – as well as the Royal Thai Marine police – described to the Guardian how “ghost licences” allow boats unfettered access into Malaysian, Burmese or Indonesian waters, where other ghost boats then keep watch for patrolling authorities.
“There’s a technique,” a high-ranking marine police officer in Kantang, on the Andaman coast, told the Guardian. “If you have 10 boats, you buy a licence for just two or three boats. Then you’ll have two boats with the same name, and two with no name.” He chuckles. “If they get stopped, they have a licence to show the authorities, but really it’s a fake licence.”
Not every deep-sea trawler is a ghost boat or manned by slaves. But on two separate occasions at Songkhla port, the Guardian was present when two slaves were brought back to shore on cargo boats ferrying trash fish that they, and the other slaves on their boats, had trawled. On both occasions, the Guardian followed the trash fish as it was loaded on to trucks at port and delivered to two separate fishmeal factories that supply CP Foods – a direct link proving that the multinational was buying fishmeal from factories that have slavery in their supply chain.