Organizer: Greenpeace USA and NYU Wagner

Type/Location: In person / New York City

Description:

For Indonesian who lives in coastal areas for generations, going out to sea for a better living is common. When the local fishing industry cannot offer any betterment, many youths are attracted to bet their fortune in foreign fishing vessels. However, for some of the crews the working conditions in the high seas fishing industry are not as good as their catches which we find sometimes only in fancy restaurants. They face violent physical abuses, bad food, and untreated illness which sometimes leads to their death. The film director Kasan Kurdi states that this film “shows the irony of a modern life in the contrary to the efforts to fill the human basic needs: eat.” Further he says that the crews “are going out to sea for two big missions: to fill the public demand from all over the world for seafood and to feed their own family at home while hoping that they could make a better living.” Using the crews' mobile phone footage, the Indonesian Migrant Workers Union's owned video archive and Greenpeace video archive, Before You Eat follows a group of crews to show how the exploitation of the Indonesian fishing vessel crews happens not only before they leave Indonesia and while working in foreign fishing vessels but also when they go back home. It portrays the crew’s recruitment process, the working conditions and how the modern slavery system has trapped the crews to do illegal fishing practices while working in the foreign vessels. As Before You Eat Director Kasan Kurdi points out that “this industry sacrifices its workers while depleting the ocean.” In the end for Kasan Kurdi Before You Eat then leaves one open question: "how do we supposedly treat this only one ocean?"

Through the Before You Eat documentary, messages from fishers who have worked aboard these vessels, along with a panel discussion led by experts in the field, this enlightening evening will explore the complexities of the twinned issues of environmental and human rights abuses at sea.

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