Like many before him, Wai Yan fled Burma in search of a better life. At the age of 16, he was recruited onto a Thai fishing boat, beckoned by the promise of high wages. But once on board the vessel, it would be two years before he was to see land again.

"Every time I saw the mother ship come, I would cry because I wanted to go home. But I couldn’t because they wouldn't let me", he told The Ecologist.

Taken to fish hundreds of miles out at sea in the Indian ocean, he was continually trafficked between vessels, his only contact with the outside world a supply boat that would bring food and fuel and carry the fish back to Thai ports.

Malnutrition and killings

"In those years I got to sleep around 4 hours each day. The captain would carry a gun with him all the time so we didn't dare to say no to him. It was a very hard life, I got skinny and weak from malnutrition. I got seasick all the time, I had to work as much as they wanted me to. I often had a suicidal thought during those time. The only reason that I was be able to come back is because the boat start to leak. I didn’t have any mobile phone, no way of communication. All I knew and saw was the sea itself."

"But we didn’t dare to claim our salary," he says. "One of my friend said 'have you seen all of these anonymous dead body floating around near by the port? Those are the people that complain'."

Wai Yan is not alone. Fellow Burmese migrant Nyan described typical working conditions: "When working, we invest our whole life, we are in their hands and there is nothing we can do about it. When given orders we have to follow...we have to eat when they say, sleep when they say. There absolutely no excuse for anything. It's really bad. When I made mistakes sorting the fish, they would hit me with a metal stick. They even tried to shoot me", Nyan says.

Working undercover, The Ecologist managed to gain access to several trawlers fishing offshore. We were shown typical tiny living quarters consisting of crudely slatted boards for sleeping set under waist-high ceilings, bare but for a few items of clothing, rusty knives and the fitted ship horns ready to wake the crew for the round-the-clock toil of sorting the catches.

We were told of captains force-feeding amphetamines to half-starved crew members, the routine killing of crew members who complain and Burmese migrants leaping from the backs of vessels in suicidal bids to escape the torment of life at sea.

One man we spoke to described a killing he witnessed: "The captain took his gun and shot him until he fell off the boat. He fell in the gap between the two boats. He didn't die right away, he tried to come up, but the captain just gave him another shot until he sank away...I've seen this happen twice", he said.

The supermarket link

Thai fishing fleets trawl the rich coastline areas of the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea. During this investigation, crew members in some of the largest ports told The Ecologist how the fleets routinely fish illegally in the waters of other countries, most commonly in Burma and Malaysia, but also as far as Bangladesh, Indonesia and even Australia.

Grinding Nemo: floating factory farms