We submit the following comments to Marine Stewardship Council's consultation on labor requirements for fisheries and supply chains on behalf of the Thai Seafood Working Group. The Seafood Working Group is a coalition of nearly 60 environmental, human rights and labor organizations from about a dozen countries dedicated to the eradication of all forms of worker exploitation, including human trafficking and forced labor, in the seafood trade, particularly in Thailand.

In August of 2016, Amnesty International released a detailed report exposing egregious labor violations—including forced labor, child labor, exposure to toxic pesticides, and failure to pay minimum wages—on plantations owned by palm oil giant Wilmar, a supplier to major global brands, including Unilever, ColgatePalmolive, Kellogg’s, Nestle, and Procter & Gamble. Incredibly, three of the five plantations where the abuses were documented were certified as “sustainable” palm oil producers by the industry certification scheme, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).

Increasingly, the exploitation of workers has been at the center of controversies in the palm oil industry. In 2015, forced labor and human trafficking on the plantations of one of Malaysia’s biggest palm oil companies, Felda Global Ventures, made front page news in the Wall Street Journal, showing that global brands are buying Conflict Palm Oil produced by forced labor.