(December 21, 2020; The Conversation)
...Forced labor is a known problem in open ocean fishing, but the scale has been very hard to track historically. This mystery – why so many vessels are fishing the high seas if it isn’t profitable – got our team thinking that maybe many of these vessels are, in a sense, being subsidized through low labor costs. These costs could even be zero if the vessels were using forced labor.
By combining our team’s data science expertise with satellite monitoring, input from human rights practitioners and machine learning algorithms, we developed a way to predict if a fishing vessel was at high risk of using forced labor. Our study shows that up to 100,000 individuals may have been victims of forced labor between 2012 and 2018 on these ships...
Read the rest from The Conversation: Thousands of ocean fishing boats could be using forced labor – we used AI and satellite data to find them