King prawns, once a luxury, are now an everyday delicacy if you’re American. We buy it cheap, and the labor cost of their production is unbelievable. This is the story of globalized slavery and how large international supermarkets such as Walmart, Tesco, Carrefour, Morrisons and Iceland are selling shrimp fed by slave labor.
The Thai fishing industry is rife with ill-treatment, torture and summary executions. Thailand is the world’s largest supplier of shrimp. A six-month investigation by The Guardian has traced the complex food chain from boats to supermarket shelves and demonstrated for the first time that the low price of prawns on your plate depends on slave labour.
Late at night, a cargo ship pulls into one of Thailand’s busiest ports. On board was a man who hadn’t seen land in 18 months. Like many Thai ports, it is a human trafficking center where international slave networks are often bought and sold on illegal fishing boats that immigrate to Thailand… and are not safe.
The last time he was back on land, he was tricked and sold on to another ship. This time, his freedom was bought by a local charity for £450. Terrified and confused, not knowing that he is free, he worries that he may soon become a victim of human trafficking again. Even freed, he still dreads being seen on camera.
A former Cambodian monk is also part of the invisible migrant workers supporting Thailand’s multibillion-dollar shrimp industry. Every year, thousands of migrants pay brokers large sums of money to smuggle them to Thailand in search of a better life. As his parents struggled to raise six children, he left Myanmar to care for his siblings. After his mother died, he was abandoned by his father. He was a pagoda boy until he left rural Burma as a teenager.
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