This week, UnionAID is launching a new project with Destructive Fishing Watch (DFW) Indonesia to address forced labour and human trafficking in Indonesia’s fisheries sector. With thanks to our Kiwi Solidarity Members, for enabling us to fund this important project!
Indonesian fisheries workers are often subjected to difficult and unsafe and often life-threatening conditions that can involve forced labour and human trafficking.
The new partnership between UnionAID and Destructive Fishing Watch in Indonesia will focus on the Aru Islands Regency where the situation for fisheries workers is dire. The project will work with local and village governments and communities to establish early detection and reporting systems to help prevent instances of forced labour and human trafficking.
Muhammad Arifuddin, a representative from DFW, said: “Partnering with UnionAID and its supporters in New Zealand brings new hope in tackling the difficult and sometimes life-threatening conditions that fisheries workers in Indonesia face.”
Tim Sutton, Executive Director of UnionAID, said: “This project highlights the urgent need to address workers’ safety in industries where the risk is not just worker exploitation but workers’ lives.”
DFW-Indonesia is an association that is an alliance of organisations and individuals concerned with the issues of sustainable fisheries, poverty, climate change, protection of fishing and fisheries workers, and destructive fishing practices and illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.
Find out more about the project
For more around the issue of trafficking and slavery in the fisheries industry, you can listen to Kim Hill’s interview from last Saturday with Investigative Reporter, Ian Urbina, who has spent years investigating human trafficking and slavery on fishing vessels on the world’s oceans. Listen here.
