Business
The rule of law on land rests on centuries of careful drafting, settled borders and strong enforcement. At sea it becomes fluid, and far enough from shore it barely exists. The oceans are too big to police and fall under no clear authority, so the lawlessness comes from what is missing rather than from anything the sea itself does.
Shoppers want to believe fish can be caught sustainably and legally by crews on fair contracts and still sell for $2.50 a can within days of the catch. That is a fantasy. Middlemen who supply the crews make it workable by pushing the real costs onto workers far out of sight, so globalization works more like a market sleight of hand than an invisible hand.
The tangle of rules at sea is better at protecting what a ship carries than the people who work on it. That imbalance is part of why cruelty to crews can go on unchecked.
The ocean is outlaw not because it is good or bad, but because it is an empty space, as silence is to sound. A place without rules does not create evil on its own. It lets in whatever people bring, from smugglers and slavers to activists offering services that are banned on shore.
Forced labor did not vanish when it was banned on land. It moved offshore, onto fishing boats months from any port, where workers are held in conditions close to slavery. Gaps in national labor law leave these crews with nowhere to turn.
A ship's flag is supposed to say which country is responsible for it. Owners can register under convenient foreign flags and switch them at will, so a vessel can effectively disappear from oversight.
About 90 percent of world trade moves by ship. Billions of the world's poorest people rely on the ocean for food and work, and it absorbs most of the heat and carbon from burning the fuels drilled from it. The crime in the fishing, oil and shipping industries is therefore built into the economy everyone relies on, which makes ordinary consumers complicit.
When no one enforces the rules in international waters, fish stocks are stripped and workers are harmed alongside them. Illegal fishing boats can sometimes be stopped only by private groups chasing them for months.
Huge long-distance fishing fleets work so far from home that deaths on board are handled out of public view. Bodies are dropped at foreign ports, in one case about one every six weeks for years.