Ian Urbina

And she mentioned after the time I recorded last time, she was like, you have to talk to the people.

You have to talk to Ian.

You have to talk to Mike.

You have to talk to the people because once they break this story, this is going to be huge.

I can say infractions, but just they've done some god awful things to people and fishery slaves and everything like that that we've gone over on this episode.

When you saw the opportunity to work with the Outlaw Ocean Project, did you make that connection right off the bat? Or you were just like, I wonder what this is about? Or how did you find out about this project?

I really found out about it through getting employed as an intern of Ian Urbina in 2019, which was actually the year that the Outlaw Ocean Project was founded.

So going into that job interview, I had no idea what I was getting into.

We eat a lot of fish and shrimp in this country, and much of it is imported from farms.

We moved in the direction of farmed fish to reduce overfishing of our oceans, but journalist Ian Urbina's five-year investigation finds that relying on farmed fish is worsening the problem of overfishing, as it sweeps up vast numbers of small ocean fish to feed the farmed salmon or other seafood consumers love.

And if that weren't bad enough, the food for fish, or fish meal industry, also pollutes and uses forced labor.

Ian joins us now to talk about his investigation into the farmed seafood supply chain by his organization The Outlaw Ocean Project, which he just wrote about for The New York Times Magazine.

It's a net, and anything that it can catch it does, whether that's turtles or sharks or seabirds or tuna.

You know, whatever's in the way, it's gonna gather up, and that is a big problem 'cause there's a lot of bycatch, which is inadvertent killing of species that really you shouldn't be using for such a low-grade purpose.

We're talking with Ian Urbina, founder and director of The Outlaw Ocean Project.

The organization's new investigation, recently published in The New York Times Magazine, is called The Dirty Secret Behind the Farmed Fish You Eat.

Here's a disturbing article.

The Dirty Secret Behind the Farmed Fish You Eat by Ian Urbina.

Those of us who have recently eaten farm-raised seafood are participating in a developing environmental crisis.

That would be bad enough, but the so-called reduction industry driving the crisis also flouts the law and puts people in danger.

For the past five years, the nonprofit news organization The Outlaw Ocean Project has investigated the fish meal industry, and today it's releasing its findings in a project called Food for Feed.

Ian Urbina is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

He's director of The Outlaw Ocean Project.

He's in Washington, D.C. this morning.

Thank you very much.

Thanks for having me.

Ian Urbina is director of The Outlaw Ocean Project.

The group's latest investigation is Food for Feed.

Last year, more than 30,000 tons was produced, but a lot more salmon that ends up on plates around the world comes from China, including from the Xinjiang region, which is landlocked and known for its deserts.

To talk about this, we have reached journalist Ian Urbina once again.

He's with a nonprofit called The Outlaw Ocean Project, which has been investigating the fish farming industry in this part of China.

Before we get into this report, tell us about the Xinjiang region and why it now has fish farms.

And Ian, now before we let you go, where can people find this reporting?

Uh, theoutlawocean.com will have it all.

That was journalist Ian Urbina.

He's the founder of The Outlaw Ocean Project.

We've run out of those.

But I also have one time we took Ian Urbina, who's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.

We took him out chasing the Chinese squid boats west of Galapagos.

And to get in there, what we did, so we took my ship out there and we changed our MMSI number.