S2 E7: The unspoken cost of seafood (China Pt. 2)

Spread across the Earth’s oceans, the Chinese distant-water fishing fleet is the single largest armada in human history. This three-part series is an unprecedented investigation into their secretive fishing practices. The fleet is so gargantuan that even the Chinese government can’t account for all its vessels. We do know it has hauled in more than 35 billion dollars worth of catch per year and has sold it across the globe — and yet, almost nothing was known about its practices. That is, until The Outlaw Ocean team started asking questions, and eventually managed to climb aboard a dozen Chinese vessels to investigate.Episode highlights: Nowhere is more difficult to report than China, and seafood is an unusually tough product to investigate. Host Ian Urbina explains the various reporting methods his team needed to employ over the course of four years to track how seafood gets from bait to plate.Right at the heart of this secretive supply chain, the team finds forced Uyghur labour, with the cascading effects of family separation, relocation and a plummeting birth rate. The international community has scrutinized China’s human rights abuses against this predominantly Muslim ethnic minority, and specific laws were set up to protect them from exploitation – but the Uyghur people’s role in seafood production was totally off the radar. In total, we identified forced Uyghur labour tied to seafood imported to more than twenty countries, including the U.S. and Canada. Urbina reflects on the many costs hidden along this complex supply chain, and the larger question: how have we allowed the seafood we eat to be so thoroughly co-mingled with environmental and human rights abuses? What is the true cost of the low prices we see on our seafood? And who’s really paying for it? 

Spread across the Earth’s oceans, the Chinese distant-water fishing fleet is the single largest armada in human history. This three-part series is an unprecedented investigation into their secretive fishing practices. The fleet is so gargantuan that even the Chinese government can’t account for all its vessels. We do know it has hauled in more than 35 billion dollars worth of catch per year and sold it across the globe — and yet, almost nothing was known about its practices. That is, until the Outlaw Ocean team started asking questions, and eventually managed to get aboard.Episode highlights:Averaging one dead body every six weeks, mostly-Chinese fishing vessels have been dropping their deceased off in Uruguay’s coastal capital for years. But in 2021, an Indonesian deckhand named Daniel Aritonang arrives clinging to life. He’s conscious enough to say he'd been beaten, tied up by the neck, and starved for days.We learn Daniel’s story is shockingly common in the world’s Chinese-run fish processing infrastructure. It's a realm where health and human safety are secondary to meeting quotas and where forced labour and human rights abuses are rampant. We learn how vulnerable people like Daniel are recruited, and how routinely they never make it home.The team is convinced that they need to speak directly to the crew on one of these vessels. They themselves are shocked when a captain agrees to let them aboard. Even more surprising, a minder briefly leaves host Ian Urbina alone with the crew and immediately some men plead to be rescued. 

What started off as a dream job, slowly revealed itself to be a nightmare. Josh Farenello moved to southern India to oversee a shrimp-processing plant, but it soon dawned on him that he’d been really been hired as an American face to “whitewash” a forced-labour factory. The largely female employees were effectively trapped on the compound, routinely underpaid, and forced to live in inhumane, unsanitary conditions. Over several months, Josh meticulously gathered evidence that he brought to the Outlaw Ocean team for this exclusive exposé.Episode highlights:Processing seafood is a race against the clock to prevent spoilage, so the Choice Canning plant in Amalapuram runs more or less 24/7. There’s also not a lot of automation in shrimp processing, so this means that the factory relies on an enormous amount of labour to deliver 40 shipping containers full of packaged shrimp — every single day. Josh starts to poke around the factory, to understand the layers of how such a high volume/low cost product is even possible. He finds migrant workers from India’s lowest castes living in deplorable conditions — like shared beds with bedbug-infested mattresses — as well as downright dangerous conditions, like a secret dorm above the plants’ ammonia compressors. He also realized there are hundreds more people living on site than the paperwork accounts for, and they cannot freely leave.The discrepancy continues between what Josh has witnessed and what’s officially tracked on paper. Another place that shows up is in shrimp that have been treated with antibiotics. Josh says “Oscar” shrimp (a euphemism for antibiotics) have been shipped to markets where their use is illegal, like the U.S. He makes the case you won’t find in official documents.

Depending on who you ask, Max Hardberger is either a seagoing James Bond or a swashbuckling pirate. Hardberger runs a rare kind of repo service, extracting huge ships from foreign ports. His company is a last resort for ship owners whose vessels have been seized, often by bad actors, and over the years he’s built a reputation for taking the kinds of jobs others turn down. Hardberger’s specialty is infiltrating hostile territory and taking control of ships in whatever way he can – usually through subterfuge and stealth. Whatever part of the world his missions take him, Hardberger thrives in its grey areas. Episode highlights:Host Ian Urbina takes us back to the beginning, when a young Max was teaching himself to sail and piecing together a living by doing odd jobs. That is until the gig that changed it all. After Hardberger successfully recovered a stolen ship from Venezuela, his phone just kept on ringing.Some of the most lucrative stealing happens in the world’s murkiest waters. Hardberger explains that his “sweet spot” is in extra-judicial areas, and walks us through his unconventional toolkit of tactics and tricks. He’s worked with sex workers, witch doctors, and many persuadable security guards. But we learn there are some laws even he won’t break, and some places even he won’t go. Urbina finally gets the chance to see Hardberger’s work up close, and follows him on a mission to Greece. There he hopes to repo a 261-foot freighter called The Sophia - but the job immediately proves to be more complex than even Hardberger expected. On this job, we find out where the repo man draws his line. “I like not getting killed … I like even more not going to jail in a foreign country.”

The Libyan Coast Guard is doing the European Union’s dirty work, capturing migrants as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean into Europe and throwing them in secret prisons. There, they are extorted, abused and sometimes killed. An investigation into the death of Aliou Candé, a young farmer and father from Gineau-Bisseau, puts the Outlaw Ocean team in the cross-hairs of Libya’s violent and repressive regime. In this stunning three-part series, we take you inside the walls of one of the most dangerous prisons, in a lawless regime where the world’s forgotten migrants languish. Ep. 3 highlights:Host Ian Urbina is detained, beaten and brought to a secret prison. He believes he is going to die. And still, he knows this is only “a sliver of what the migrants we are covering go through.”Urbina learns his team is being held in the same facility. They make proof-of-life videos as their respective governments intervene to get them out. Ian reflects on Western privilege and the lottery of birth. He, unlike Aliou, gets to go home. He also gets to report what he saw: a war on migration. A war with an army, a navy, and an air force. A war likely to spread as more poor, desperate migrants risk it all to reach safer shores.

The Libyan Coast Guard is doing the European Union’s dirty work, capturing migrants as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean into Europe and throwing them in secret prisons. There, they are extorted, abused and sometimes killed. An investigation into the death of Aliou Candé, a young farmer and father from Gineau-Bisseau, puts the Outlaw Ocean team in the cross-hairs of Libya’s violent and repressive regime. In this stunning three-part series, we take you inside the walls of one of the most dangerous prisons, in a lawless regime where the world’s forgotten migrants languish. Ep. 2 highlights:The EU has claimed they play no role in this migrant crisis, even as they provide boats, buses, petrol — even the tablets the Libyans use to count up their captives.Once captured and counted, those migrants are often held in a network of secretive prisons run by competing militias, where exploitation, abuse, and death are common. They are also routinely “rented” as everything from farm labour to soldiers in battle.Aliou Candé was sent to a prison, where he died at the hands of prison guards, while trying to protect himself from a melee. “I’m not going to fight. I’m the hope of my entire family.”

The Libyan Coast Guard is doing the European Union’s dirty work, capturing migrants as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean into Europe and throwing them in secretive prisons. There, they are extorted, abused and sometimes killed. An investigation into the death of Aliou Candé, a young farmer and father from Gineau-Bisseau, puts the Outlaw Ocean team in the cross-hairs of Libya’s violent and repressive regime. In this stunning three-part series, we take you inside the walls of one of the most dangerous prisons, in a lawless regime where the world’s forgotten migrants languish.Ep. 1 highlights:On our mission to chronicle the anarchy of the world’s oceans, we knew we had to cover the Mediterranean crisis. The EU's shadow immigration system is a harbinger of things to come, as climate change and (often newly illegal) migration create the perfect conditions for a humanitarian crisis.The face of that crisis often looks like Aliou Candé, a 28-year-old farmer and a father of three children who hoped to lift his family out of poverty.To hear all episodes of Season 2 right now — early and ad-free — subscribe here.

In season two of The Outlaw Ocean, host Ian Urbina sheds light on the secretive Libyan prisons swallowing up sea-faring migrants; flagrant human rights abuses in China’s massive off-shore fleet; the horrors of a shrimp processing plant in India; and the wild story of a modern-day James Bond — if he were a repo man. New episodes weekly on Wednesdays, starting on June 4, 2025.  

Covering two-thirds of the planet, the sea is a workplace for more than 50 million people. The oceans produce half the air we breathe, and more than 80 percent of the products we consume traverse the oceans. Aside from being vital, the oceans are also distinctly fascinating for the universality and peculiarity of mariner culture. This epilogue episode shares a more personal and behind-the-scenes account of a body of reporting trips mostly done at sea — and how this experience can affect a person, for better and worse. It discusses the importance of investigative reporting in a time of clickbait journalism, and it makes an argument for immersive storytelling in our era of information overload. Lastly, the episode suggests that if The Outlaw Ocean reporting is to offer any insight into human nature, it tells us about the thin line between civilization and the lack of it – and why better and more governance is essential to the future of our species and the planet. Guest Interview Bren Smith, fisherman & founder of Greenwave For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/the-outlaw-ocean-transcripts-listen-1.6727090

When a ship inadvertently spills oil, it’s big news. But every three years, ships intentionally dump more oil than the Exxon Valdez, and BP spills combined. This episode highlights a vexing and woefully under-discussed problem. It is made possible by corrupt ship captains who use a so-called “Magic Pipe” that dumps oil discreetly under the water line rather than disposing of it on land as legally required. To learn about this problem, the episode tells the story of Carnival’s Caribbean Princess cruise ship, which used such a pipe and was caught, convicted and hit with the biggest fine in history. This case is set in a broader context of other forms of at-sea dumping, such as plastic pollution, and highlights how the sea has long — and perilously — been viewed as a bottomless trash can. Guest Interviews Annie Leonard, CEO of Greenpeace, creator of “The Story of Plastic” Richard Udell, DOJ Prosecutor on the Caribbean Princess Case For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/the-outlaw-ocean-transcripts-listen-1.6727090