November 25, 2019
HU Senior Manager of Investments, Ame Sagiv, testified last week before the United States House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee at the Subcommittee hearing on Water, Oceans, and Wildlife. In response to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) recent report identifying nations engaged in illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, her testimony focused on the intersection of IUU and forced labor.
“Environmental and labor abuses in the seafood industry are intractable, complex problems that mutually enable and reinforce one another—they are inextricably intertwined. For too long, the environmental and labor movements operated in silos. In recent years, it has been encouraging to see these two movements begin more regular coordination and collaboration, in recognition of the shared drivers and solutions within both issue areas. Having personally worked in the environmental movement at the Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy for many years, it has been plain to me that this does not have to be an either/or proposition. In fact, if we do not deal with these twin issues as two sides of the same coin, we are bound to fail on both counts. We must think of the labor and the environmental issues as one complete package. Even in a world that is divided on many issues, we can all agree that we do not want human trafficking in our seafood any more than we want to see our precious marine resources degraded and reduced to nothing.”
“We have an opportunity to move these issues forward, towards better practice for people and planet… We cannot simply brush off the suffering in our supply chains; we can take this as an opening to act to help protect our food supply, not just from IUU fishing but from forced labor—a practice that is also illegal, unreported, and unregulated.”