Caterers in Washington tweeted a photo of maroon sashimi appetizers served to 700 guests attending the governor’s inaugural ball last year. They were told the tuna was from Montauk.

But it was an illusion. It was the dead of winter and no yellowfin had been landed in the New York town.

An Associated Press investigation traced the supply chain of national distributor Sea To Table to other parts of the world, where fishermen described working under slave-like conditions with little regard for marine life.

In a global seafood industry plagued by deceit, conscientious consumers will pay top dollar for what they believe is local, sustainably caught seafood. But even in this fast-growing niche market, companies can hide behind murky dealings, making it difficult to know the story behind any given fish.

Sea To Table said by working directly with 60 docks along U.S. coasts it could guarantee the fish was wild, domestic and traceable — sometimes to the fisherman.

The New York-based company quickly rose in the sustainable seafood movement. While it told investors it had $13 million in sales last year, it expected growth to $70 million by 2020. The distributor earned endorsement from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and garnered media attention from Bon Appetit, Forbes and many more. Its clientele included celebrity chef Rick Bayless, Roy’s seafood restaurants, universities and home delivery meal kits such as HelloFresh.

As part of their investigation, reporters staked out America’s largest fish market, followed trucks and interviewed fishermen who worked on three continents. During a bone-chilling week, they set up a time-lapse camera at Montauk harbor that showed no tuna boats docking. The AP also had a chef order $500 worth of fish sent “directly from the landing dock to your kitchen,” but the boat listed on the receipt hadn’t been there in at least two years.

Preliminary DNA tests suggested the fish likely came from the Indian Ocean or the Western Central Pacific. There are limitations with the data because using genetic markers to determine the origins of species is still an emerging science, but experts say the promising new research will eventually be used to help fight illegal activity in the industry. 

Some of Sea To Table’s partner docks on both coasts, it turned out, were not docks at all. They were wholesalers or markets, flooded with imports. 

The distributor also offered species that were farmed, out of season or illegal to catch.

“It’s sad to me that this is what’s going on,” said chef Bayless, who hosts a PBS cooking series. He had worked with Sea To Table because he liked being tied directly to fishermen — and the “wonderful stories” about their catch. “This throws quite a wrench in all of that.”

Other customers who responded to AP said they were frustrated and confused.

Sea To Table response

Sea To Table owner Sean Dimin stressed that his suppliers are prohibited from sending imports to customers and added violators would be terminated.

“We take this extremely seriously,” he said.

Dimin also said he communicated clearly with chefs that some fish labeled as freshly landed at one port were actually caught and trucked in from other states. But customers denied this, and federal officials described it as mislabeling.

The AP focused on tuna because the distributor’s supplier in Montauk, the Bob Gosman Co., was offering chefs yellowfin tuna all year round, even when federal officials said there were no landings in the entire state.

Almost nightly, Gosman’s trucks drove three hours to reach the New Fulton Fish Market, where they picked up boxes of fish bearing shipping labels from all over the world.

Owner Bryan Gosman said some of the tuna that went to Sea To Table was caught off North Carolina and then driven 700 miles to Montauk. That practice ended in March, he said, because it wasn’t profitable. While 70 percent of his yellowfin tuna is imported, he said that fish is sold to local restaurants and sushi bars and kept separate from Sea To Table’s products.

“Can things get mixed up? It could get mixed up,” he said. “Is it an intentional thing? No, not at all.”

Some of Gosman’s foreign supply came from Land, Ice and Fish, in Trinidad and Tobago.

Indonesian fishermen

The AP interviewed and reviewed complaints from more than a dozen Indonesian fishermen who said they earned $1.50 a day, working 22 hours at a time, on boats that brought yellowfin to Land, Ice and Fish’s compound. They described finning sharks and occasionally cutting off whale and dolphin heads, extracting their teeth as good luck charms.

“We were treated like slaves,” said Sulistyo, an Indonesian who worked on one of those boats and gave only one name, fearing retaliation. “They treat us like robots without any conscience.”

Though it’s nearly impossible to tell where a specific fish ends up, or what percentage of a company’s seafood is fraudulent, even one bad piece taints the entire supply chain.

Dimin said the labor and environmental abuses are “abhorrent and everything we stand against.”

For caterers serving at the ball for Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who successfully pushed through a law to combat seafood mislabeling, knowing where his fish came from was crucial.

The Montauk tuna came with a Sea To Table leaflet describing the romantic, seaside town and the quality of the fish. A salesperson did send them an email saying the fish was caught off North Carolina. But the boxes came from New York and there was no indication it had landed in another state and was trucked to Montauk. A week later, the caterer ordered Montauk tuna again. This time the invoice listed a boat whose owner later told AP he didn’t catch anything for Sea To Table at that time.

“I’m kind of in shock right now,” said Brandon LaVielle of Lavish Roots Catering. “We felt like we were supporting smaller fishing villages.”
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Leaders of the U.S. central bank raised interest rates slightly Wednesday and signaled that rates are likely to go higher as the economy continues to strengthen.

At the end of two days of deliberation in Washington, the Federal Reserve set the key interest rate a quarter of a percent higher, at a range between 1.75 and 2 percent. They say the labor market continues to improve, spending is rising, and inflation is rising closer to the modest 2 percent annual rate that experts say helps the economy grow predictably.

Fed officials work to maximize employment while maintaining stable prices. With that in mind, they slashed interest rates to nearly zero during the recession in 2008 to boost economic activity. Now, they judge that it is time to continue raising rates because holding rates too low for too long could spark inflation, and such rapidly rising prices could harm the economy.

“The economy is doing very well,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell told journalists. “Most people who want to find jobs are finding them and unemployment and inflation are low.”

He said the Fed’s efforts to manage the economy work best when the public is told what is being done, what is being considered, and why certain decisions are made. Consequently, Powell said he will begin holding press conferences more often beginning next year. 
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German authorities fined Volkswagen nearly $1.2 billion Wednesday for its role in a diesel emissions scandal that first surfaced in the United States in 2015.

Prosecutors found the German automaker failed to properly monitor its engine development department. The lack of oversight resulted in global sales of nearly 11 million diesel vehicles with illegal emissions-controlling software.

U.S. authorities previously imposed billions of dollars in penalties on the automaker, which said Wednesday it would accept the fine announced by prosecutors in the city of Braunschweig.

Volkswagen said paying the latest fine would hopefully have “positive effects on other official proceedings being conducted in Europe” against the company and its subsidiaries.
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U.S. President Donald Trump says oil prices are too high and blames the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

The 14 oil-producing nations in OPEC — Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Venezuela among them — produce about 40 percent of the world’s oil, but about 60 percent of the oil traded on international markets. OPEC’s actions, whether to cut or increase production, often heavily influence the price of oil, and by extension the prices consumers and businesses pay for fuel.

OPEC’s oil chiefs struck a deal in 2016 to cut production by 1.8 million barrels a day to reduce the global glut of oil and shore up prices. Since then, oil prices have risen from below $30 a barrel to more than $70.

But that rollback in production is set to expire at the end of the year. OPEC has yet to set new production levels beyond that, but the cartel’s oil ministers are meeting again next week in Vienna.

Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh said in April that the global market can absorb higher oil prices, a remark that drew a swift rebuke from Trump.

“With record amounts of oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!” the U.S. leader tweeted on April 20, although he has no control over what OPEC decides to do.

Early in the year, with gas prices at service stations still relatively low, Trump suggested raising the country’s gasoline tax that customers pay at service stations by 25 cents a gallon to fund road and highway repairs.

But the president has not mentioned the tax increase idea in months as gas prices have steadily risen because of higher oil prices on the world market, eating into higher take-home pay that millions of American workers gained when Congress late last year passed tax-cut legislation supported by Trump.

The average gallon of gas in the United States now costs $2.92, far more than in such oil-producing countries as Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and far less than in other countries around the world, including Europe.
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For many years, Ivory Coast has been the world’s largest producer of cocoa. Most of it leaves the country in bulk and ends up in Europe, where it gets turned into fine and expensive chocolate, fetching up to 50 times the price of the raw cocoa.

Chocolate is the world’s favorite comfort food. Two-thirds of all that sweet stuff comes out of factories in the United States and Western Europe. It is where most people consume it, too. Almost completely left out of this feast for the palate are the countries that produce the raw material for chocolate: cocoa.

A few years ago, a Dutch-Ivorian television crew went to one of Ivory Coast’s many cocoa farms and recorded the surprise on the planters’ faces when tasting chocolate for the first time: so THIS is what they do with our cocoa beans?

Very little chocolate is consumed in Africa, but this Ivorian entrepreneur is planning to change that. 

Axel Emmanuel Gbaou says he worked at a commercial bank until 2010 before he decided to go into the business of making chocolate. The taste for the sweet bars came from his mother, who had been living among Swiss missionaries, great chocolate lovers. His conviction came from doing some basic arithmetic.

Eighty percent of next year’s cocoa beans, he explains, have already been bought up by the big multinational companies that transport them raw to the chocolate factories in other parts of the world. One kilo of chocolate fetches up to 50 times more than one kilo of unprocessed cocoa beans. Axel wants some of that money to stay in Ivory Coast.

In this nondescript building close to the market in Abidjan’s Cocody district, you will find the production unit, the packaging center and sales office. Axel’s company sells its products to an ever expanding circle of customers, including the global airline Air France.

Back in the cocoa producing fields, the situation is dire. World market prices have been falling for two years. In response, the government of Ivory Coast has lowered the standard price per kilo. 

Agronomist N’dourou M’beo is quality control manager at Axel’s company. He says current cocoa prices stand at around $1.40 per kilo. That is the raw harvest that gets shipped out of the country. But after some basic treatment — roasting and winnowing — those beans fetch three times as much and they can be stored for months. This is one model the company has adopted. As a result, more work and money stay on the farm and the company has a reliable supply of quality beans.

The world is the market, but Axel’s biggest challenge lies right here in Africa. 

In the next two years, he says he wants to sell 100 million bars of chocolate on the African continent. 

That sounds like a lot, but in fact with well more than one billion inhabitants and a fast growing middle class that can afford buying a few bars at $3 each, he thinks it is perfectly doable.

 

 
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When 13-year-old Mounir fled Syria for Lebanon with his family after surviving a rocket strike that nearly killed them, he thought he would be safe. In fact, he had swapped one form of danger for another – sexual harassment and verbal abuse.

With his father unable to work for health reasons, Mounir had to earn money for his family selling sweets in the city of Tripoli – a job that kept him out on the streets until 11pm, making about 12,000 Lebanese pounds ($8) a day.

“It was very hostile – people used to call me the ‘Syrian dog’ and other things,” Mounir – not his real name – told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“I would get really hurt, sometimes I would just sit and cry. It was humiliating.”

Aid groups say more and more Syrian children like Mounir are having to work as poverty intensifies among the about 1 million refugees living in Lebanon – roughly a quarter of the country’s population.

The proportion of Syrian child refugees working in Lebanon has risen to 7 percent from 4 percent in late 2016, according to research by the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) released early to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“It is sad to say that it is only going to get worse,” said Benedict Nixon, spokesman for the Council. “As long as households are not generating income, rates of child labor will

continue to increase.”

The United Nations and aid agencies warned last month that a “critical gap” in funding for Syrian refugees and host communities could lead to cuts in vital services.

Globally, conflict and climate-induced disaster have driven more children into working in agriculture, which accounts for 71 percent of all child labor according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

“Households in Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon, for example, are prone to resort to child labour to ensure the survival of their family,” the FAO said in a statement released on Tuesday to mark World Day Against Child Labor.

“Breaking Point”

Tanya Chapuisat, spokeswoman for the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, said Syrian families in Lebanon often had no choice but to send their children to work.

“Families are at their breaking point when it comes to debt, and so to be able to get their basic needs they are sending kids to work,” she said.

Mounir’s mother Hasnaa says she feels intense guilt but has no choice but to send Mounir and his 17-year-old brother out to work rather, depriving them of an education.

The rent alone on the small garage where the family lives is 280,000 Lebanese pounds a month.

“It feels like nothing is enough. Everything we have goes into paying for rent,” she said.

More than three quarters of the refugees in Lebanon are living below the poverty line and struggling to survive on less than $4 per day, according to UNICEF, and less than half the Syrian children in the country attend school.

Mounir knows his life is not like most 13-year-olds’.

“A kid should be living a life of dignity and respect with no humiliation,” he said.

Clutching his hands, he recalled the times when men on the street would approach him for sex.

“They tried to do bad things. I would not accept,” he said, as he stared down at the ground.

“This has happened more than once to me on the street. They were all men. Of course I was scared of this. They would ask me to come with them and I would tell them I didn’t want to go.”

Even at 13, he said he was often the oldest on the streets, where children as young as five worked alongside him.

Last month he found work closer to home at a barber shop, where he earns 30,000 Lebanese pounds a week sweeping and helping the owner – though he still works 10-hour days.

His favorite subject at school before Syria’s seven-year war cut his education short was math, and he dreams of going back to learn how to read and write.

“I want to become a mechanic. I like fixing things like motors,” he said with a big, dimpled smile.

($1 = 1,505.0000 Lebanese pounds)
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The savannah scrubland where Chief João Ponce once hunted deer and wild boar in Brazil has given way to neat rows of soy and corn that a tractor sprays with herbicide. In the next field, silver grain silos shimmer in the hot sun.

Ponce is head of the Uirapuru indigenous community which has allowed local farmers to produce crops on one-third of its 44,500-acre (18,000-hectare) reservation in southwestern Mato Grosso state.

The one-tenth or less share of the harvests has helped the Pareci natives to buy cars and smartphones, replace hammocks with beds and equip their thatched huts with widescreen TVs, freezers and broadband Internet antennas.

“We’re surrounded by farmers. We can’t live off hunting anymore. The animals are gone,” he said, sitting in a hammock in his thatched hut.

But the partnership with non-native farmers, fueled by an insatiable demand for Brazilian soy in China and other markets, is illegal and has alarmed environmentalists.

Brazil’s environmental regulator Ibama last week fined six native communities and a dozen farmers on reservation land for using genetically modified crops (GMO) and engaging in large-scale mechanized agriculture. Both are banned on reservation land.

The unprecedented fines totaling 129 million reais ($33 million) mark an unexpected escalation in a dispute between rival federal agencies, environmentalists, farmers and native advocacy groups over Indian tribes getting into commercial agriculture in Brazil’s rapidly expanding farm belt.

“We are not targeting the Indian. He has been besieged, co-opted. He’s a victim, and the environment of the reservations is being hurt by this pressure for land,” said René de Oliveira, the agency’s main enforcer.

He said the use of GMO soy was the worst crime because nobody knows the environmental impact such crops can have on the biodiversity of protected areas like reservations.

The crackdown could mean trouble for major grain trading firms such as ADM, Cargill and Bunge if they are caught buying soy grown on native land.

“The companies can be fined, because the Indians are not allowed to grow GMO crops and traders are not allowed to buy from reservations,” Oliveira said.

Cargill said in an emailed statement that it only bought products originating from properties in compliance with Brazilian law and verified their status before any commercial transaction. ADM did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bunge directed a request to soy processor association Abiove.

Five grain trading houses, including Cargill and Bunge, were recently fined 24.6 million reais for buying crops grown on illegally deforested land in the Amazon.

Local farmers said it was very hard to trace the origin of grains because traders only need to ask for the seller’s tax ID and not the location or size of the plantation.

That has made it easier for tribes looking to cash in on an agribusiness boom, turning their coveted savannah into fertile farmland with the know-how of white farmers.

Ibama fined communities of the Pareci, Nambikwara and Manoki tribes and embargoed 40,000 acres of their land that were being used for large-scale GMO plantations in the municipalities of Campo Novo do Parecis and Conquista do Oeste, or “Conquest of the West,” near the border with Bolivia.

The tribes are pressing to change environmental and Indian laws so that they can keep their plantations and sell their harvests legally. The issue has put Ibama at odds with the Indian affairs agency Funai, which wants to allow the tribes to become farmers.

“We want to be able to sell to Bunge, Amaggi, Cargill, Dreyfus, so we can buy our own machinery. But without licensing that shows the origin, our soy has to go out clandestinely,” said Arnaldo Zunizakae, who manages farming on the vast Pareci reservation of 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares).

Demand for Land

China’s appetite for Brazilian soybeans has driven up land values in Mato Grosso, the country’s biggest soy state. Eager for more access to reservation lands, farm and mining lobbies in Brasilia are exploiting divisions between Ibama and Funai.

Fault lines have also opened within the tribes between traditionalists and opportunists at odds over how to manage ancestral lands and preserve native customs and culture.

Brazilian law prohibits the arrangement under which the tribes have allowed farmers to develop industrial-scale production of commodity crops in return for a share of the harvest. The farmers cover the costs and hire crop dusters to spray fields with herbicide for GMO crops.

Funai said in an email that it was seeking a formula that allowed native peoples to choose their own development path. But federal prosecutors dealing with native issues said GMO crops or partnerships with non-natives would not be permitted.

“We won’t be able to sow this year’s crop. Conventional crops are more costly to store and harder to sell. We’d be pushed back into primitive 20th century agriculture,” said Zunizakae, climbing combine harvester bought by his tribe.

Unexpected Allies

The neighboring Nambikwara tribe has taken to blocking the road through its reservation to press for the right to engage in commercial agriculture. With their faces painted, Nambikwaras have demanded a toll from truck drivers moving soy for export.

The grains are trucked to barges on the Madeira river and loaded onto ships in the Amazon for China and other countries.

Brazil’s powerful farm lobby, a traditional foe of native communities in disputes over their ancestral lands, seized on the cause of the Indians involved in commercial agriculture.

“I totally support the Indian’s right to employ his free initiative to overcome poverty and not depend on handouts from the government,” said Nilson Leitão, a congressman from Mato Grosso and leaders of the farm states caucus.

The prospect of allowing commercial farming on reservations galls environmentalists and anthropologists who warn it will destroy native cultures and lead to exploittion of the Indians.

Not so, say Pareci elders, who point to advances made by their 1,800-strong tribe due to agricultural income, including better schools, health care and university grants for Parecis.

“If it were not for this, we would be dying,” said Chief Narciso Kazoizax, wearing a jaguar skin over his shoulders and a headdress of red and blue macaw feathers. Eighty percent of his tribe speak their native Aruak language, a sure sign of a strong culture, he said.

Infant mortality among the Parecis has fallen dramatically from 24 deaths in 2015 to only one last year and the community has been able to afford expensive surgeries that Funai’s medical service can no longer provide.

“We do have a better life thanks to the plantations,” said Zeferino, a shaman who sat weaving a basket as he watched Liverpool defeat Roma in the European soccer Champions League.

“We don’t want to become rich like white men. We just want to survive better,” he said with a smile, revealing perfect dentures.
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