Who really pays for cheap seafood?

Cheap seafood is not the problem. For millions of households, an affordable bag of frozen prawns or a tin of fish is what keeps seafood on the weekly menu at all, and an industry that can deliver good protein at a fair price is doing something right.

The problem is the part of the price that comes from cutting corners on people. And the main victims of that, after the workers themselves, are the companies that refuse to cut them.

In March 2025 the International Labour Organization and Indonesia's national research agency, BRIN, published the country's first Survey on Decent Work in Marine Fishing. Between November 2023 and September 2024, researchers interviewed 3,396 fishers in 18 ports. Only 9.3% had a written contract, falling to 1.5% on small vessels and rising to 18.4% on large ones. Hiring was overwhelmingly informal: just 2.2% of migrant fishers had found their jobs through a recruitment agency or broker.

The worst cases went further. The ILO reported that around 1.5% of crew were in conditions that meet its criteria for forced labour: passports and seafarer's books confiscated, threats of violence or dismissal, deductions from wages, and debts to owners, captains or recruiters that left people unable to quit. A small percentage, but each one is a person trapped on a boat, and each case undermines trust in the whole supply chain.

None of this can be spotted on a fillet. A low shelf price reflects scale, efficiency, competition, exchange rates and margins along the chain, and it proves nothing on its own about how workers were treated. A high price guarantees nothing either. Telling shoppers to vote with their wallets asks them to judge something they cannot see.

Traceability helps, but knowing which port a product left from is not the same as knowing whether the crew were paid. Certification, audits and buying policies all have a role, and all are only as strong as the standards behind them and the checks on whether they are met. A paper trail that stops at the dock misses what happens offshore.

Responsibility sits with the industry and the governments that regulate it, not with the person at the fish counter. Retailers and importers can demand written contracts and direct, documented recruitment from their suppliers, and pay for the checks that confirm it. Flag and port states can inspect vessels and enforce the labour standards they have signed up to. Processors who already do this have every reason to want it applied to their competitors.

Every vessel that runs on unpaid or coerced labour undercuts one that pays its crew properly, and every scandal lands on the reputation of producers who did nothing wrong. Responsible operators carry the cost of doing things right and then share the blame when others don't. Getting abuse out of seafood is a matter of fair competition as well as human rights, and the industry has every reason to see it that way.