The U.S. must improve its monitoring mechanisms of seafood supply chains in order to better identify human rights violations in China, a bipartisan panel said October 24.
According to the South China Morning Post, the comments were made during a hearing hosted by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) dubbed “From Bait to Plate: How Forced Labour in China Taints America’s Seafood Supply Chain.” The CECC is a group of lawmakers and politicians that advises Congress and the executive branch of the U.S. on potential human rights violations and humanitarian laws in China.
Following the hearing, the commission’s chairs sent a letter to Alejandro Mayorkas, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, urging his department to publish an order to detain all shipments from the Liaoning and Shandong provinces. The letter also requested the department put companies utilizing Uyghur labor on the UFLPA’s “entity list.”
“From fish sticks to calamari, these products infiltrate the supply chains of major restaurants, wholesalers and even find their way into the meals served in American schools and military bases,” said Chris Smith (R-NJ), one of the commission’s chairs.
Sally Yozell, the director of the Environmental Security Program at the Washington-based think tank Stimson Centre, also spoke before the panel and called on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to expand its “seafood import monitoring programme” to add labor abuses and human right violations to its definition of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.
The October 24 hearing was held following a four-year investigation by journalist Ian Urbina, who found that over 47% of Chinese squid fishing vessels he studied (357 out of 751 ships) had ties to human rights and environmental violations. Urbina also discovered that at least 1,000 Uyghurs were transported from the Xinjiang region to Shandong to process seafood supplies for dozens of U.S. brands.
“Seafood is… harder to track than many other products,” Urbina said during the hearing. “Between bait and plate, there are an inordinate number of handoffs of this product.”
Behind only China, the U.S. is the world’s second-biggest seafood importer.
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- Source: https://www.supplychainbrain.com/articles/38369-panel-said-us-must-improve-monitoring-of-chinese-seafood-supply-chains
