Somewhere off the coast of Thailand, “ghost ships” bump and crash along the choppy waves scrapping the sea floor with nets that spare nothing. Pulling up these illegal hauls in shifts that sometimes last 20 hours are thousands of migrant fishermen, many of whom have been forced into indentured servitude or kidnapped. Far from shore on unregistered boats, they have little hope of escape and face daily abuse and squalid conditions. More recently, some captains have turned to trafficking Rohingya fleeing persecution in Myanmar, pressing some into service, extorting others, and taking sex slaves.

As explored in an investigative series in The New York Times and reporting by The Guardian and AP, a cycle of human rights abuses, environmental destruction, and impunity revolves around the fishing industry in Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand. What’s more, it’s in part due to growing demand from consumers around the world, like you and me.

Catch rates for the region’s fish have been decimated in recent years. The Environmental Justice Foundation reports Thailand’s fish stocks are 85 percent depleted compared to levels 50 years ago. The Times series follows boats that are now catching “trash fish” – small herring and jack mackerel that are processed into dogfood, fish oil, or feed for factory-farmed shrimp sold to companies like Walmart and Cost Co. But to make decent profits on these small fish, and what’s left of the bigger species, fishing boats need to work longer hours and move further out to sea.

Meanwhile, Thailand faces a major labor deficit, particularly in the maritime industry, where conditions and pay are poor. The fishing fleet is annually short as many as 60,000 workers. Combined, these pressures are pushing some captains to resort to kidnapping crewmembers from shore, spending longer and longer periods at sea, and even participating in human trafficking.

Chained to the Deck

When his rice paddy was no longer enough to sustain his family, Lang Long traveled from Cambodia to the Thai border in search of a construction job that would pay more. When he arrived in Thailand, however, he was held in a room by armed men for days before he and six other migrants were herded onto a “mother ship” that shuttled them out to sea to be sold to a ghost ship, reports The New York Times’ Ian Urbina in part three of a four-part series on “the outlaw ocean.”

Over the next three years, Long was sold to two different illegal trawlers. Because labor is so hard to come by, boats sometimes erupted into fights over ownership of Long. Despite the demand for his labor, Long had no rights and suffered terrible conditions, with no more than an hour or two of sleep and one bowl of rice per day. Long and his fellows faced wounds and infections from fish scales and netting, drowning from being caught in nets, and the risk of being crushed by heavy equipment.

While Long worked on boats that used nets to catch fish near the surface, many use sea-floor trawling. Considered the most destructive form of net-fishing, trawler nets scrape the sea floor without any discretion, destroying crucial ecosystems and upending fragile fish stocks in their wake.

With fewer fish available in shallow waters and the rising cost of fuel adding pressure to captains and crew, boats have to venture further out to sea, which fisheries experts say make mistreatment of workers more likely, reports Urbina. Some captains abuse and even kill their workers to keep the rest from fleeing or overpowering them. Others drug and kidnap migrants to fill billets. Workers are not allowed to leave until they pay the debt they supposedly owe to the captain for allowing them onboard. But crews only get paid if enough fish is caught first.

In order to prevent other boats from stealing Long away, his captain chained him to the deck with a rusty collar whenever others approached, writes Urbina. A Cambodian sailor, Som Nang, who was on his first voyage aboard a mother ship that collected the catch from Long’s trawler, took notice of this and alerted the NGO Stella Maris that works to rescue migrants stuck in indentured servitude. Over the next year, they were able to pay the $750 debt to set Long free. Long is now in the process of being repatriated back to his native village in Cambodia, while Nang is working as a security guard in a factory, too disturbed by what he saw to go back to sea.

Persecuted and Sold Into Slavery

Some trawler captains, feeling the strain on the industry, get even more desperate. Human trafficking is rampant in Thailand, consistently one of the worst-rated countries on the U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Humans Report. Unregistered fishing boats, able to stay at sea for long periods of time thanks to the support of mother ships, have found extortion of fleeing migrants to be another way to get by.

By trafficking migrants from camps on land, or intercepting their ramshackle boats on the way to Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, fishing boats can receive anywhere from $900 to $3,000 a person that they pick-up and shuttle to other boats, according to reporting from The Guardian.

One of the most susceptible groups to trafficking are the Rohingya, ethnic Muslims fleeing persecution in Myanmar. The Rohingya are stateless, having been denied citizenship and recognition as an ethnic group by the military government of Myanmar. As a result there is no sovereignty that could theoretically protect them under international law.

Thai fishing boats are notorious for enslaving Rohingya seeking refuge, forcing men into the grueling fishing industry and selling women into prostitution, reports The Guardian.

A string of newly unearthed mass graves is testament to “jungle prisons” along the coast of southern Thailand where many Rohingya were kept before being shipped to boats for work. But after a push from the Thai government to shut down the camps, it is now common for traffickers to hold the migrants at sea in large commercial fishing boats, one Rohingya told The Guardian. The migrants are often packed together so tightly on the boats that they can hardly move. During the night, Thai crew members tell men to “turn the other way” while they rape women and girls.

Though the Rohingya have been fleeing Myanmar since the 1970s when their citizenship was first revoked, the number has increased dramatically in the last year. According to The Guardian, in just the first three months of 2015, 25,000 migrants were taken to boats by human traffickers – almost double the number from the same timeframe last year.

Whose Responsibility?

Dealing with human rights abuses or any violation of the law at sea has always been difficult. Vessels at sea are only required to follow the laws of the country whose flag they fly and many countries have little to no requirements for doing so. Crews in Southeast Asia often consist of a Thai captain with Burmese and Cambodian crew, and the boats frequently conduct their illegal activity in foreign or international waters, especially as longer trips become more common. On top of that, the Rohingya have no government that will claim them as citizens, no papers, and no passports.

The void in policing for these crimes was highlighted in a recent AP report, which tracked two slave boats on their journey from a remote Indonesian village being used as a holding ground for forced maritime laborers to Papa New Guinea. The boats had been repainted and their Indonesian flags had been switched for Papa New Guinea’s in order to go undetected. One former slave said his trawler had not docked in months to evade police, transferring fish to large cargo ships at sea instead.

Though it is fairly easy for these ships to hide at sea, a satellite company was able to track them at the AP’s request and identify them as identical to the ones from the Indonesian village.

The AP alerted the government of Papua New Guinea, the International Organization for Migration, Interpol, the United Nations, and the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, but authorities have yet to rescue the men at sea, lacking the resources, authority, or will.

Multinational, Multi-Causal

The constellation of crime and abuse revolving around Thailand and Southeast Asia’s fishing industry is perhaps a herald of challenges to come.

Population growth, climate change, and environmental degradation are making it harder and harder for small farmers to survive, breaking up communities and pushing more people into cities or across borders where they are more susceptible to being trafficked. Growing consumption is creating higher demand for fish, even as species disappear worldwide. And conflict and persecution are creating more refugees and driving more migrants abroad. Almost 60 million people were forcibly displaced in 2014. Meanwhile, there are few ways to track crimes or enforce the law across borders.

The fishing industry in Southeast Asia has been exploiting workers for the last decade at least, reports Urbina. The Thai government recently reacted angrily when the U.S. Department of State refused to upgrade their status in its annual human trafficking report, claiming “significant progress has been made across the board.” But U.S. officials insist that much more should be done to clean up the country’s labor abuses. For the fishing industry, the consumption drivers are not going away, the push factors for migrants aren’t going away, and the steady depletion of fisheries is not letting up.

The challenge for the international community is finding a better way to deal with these dynamics. From the shores of Australia to Lebanon and the English Channel, there’s mounting evidence that higher levels of displacement and stateless people may be a new normal. Likewise, transnational crimes, especially on the high seas, may become more common as these people search out friendlier shores and fishing fleets plunge into deeper waters. These are 21^st century challenges – multinational, multi-causal – and it’s both a moral duty and pragmatic planning to find a better way.