S2 E5: The shrimp factory whistleblower

The Outlaw Ocean

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.