Uncover - Introducing: The Outlaw Ocean S2 and The shrimp factory whistleblower

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

The Outlaw Ocean is an anthology podcast that plunges you into the vast and often lawless world of the open seas. Today we're featuring an investigation from S2 called The Shrimp Factory Whistleblower. In this episode, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Urbina joins Josh Farenello. What started off as a dream job, slowly revealed itself to be a nightmare. Josh moved to southern India to oversee a shrimp-processing plant, but it soon dawned on him that he’d been really been hired as an American face to “whitewash” a forced-labour factory. The largely female employees were effectively trapped on the compound, routinely underpaid, and forced to live in inhumane, unsanitary conditions. Over several months, Josh meticulously gathered evidence that he brought to the Outlaw Ocean team for this exclusive exposé. More episodes of The Outlaw Ocean are available at: https://link.mgln.ai/oo-uncover

You sailed beyond the horizon in search of an island scrubbed from every map You battled crackens and navigated through storms Your spades struck the lid of a long-lost treasure chest While you cooked a lasagna There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover bestselling adventure stories on Audible. This is a CBC Podcast. Where the law of the land ends, the story begins.

I'm Ian Urbina and I'm a journalist who explores the most lawless place on Earth, the vast, unpoliceable ocean. I'm also the host of the podcast series, The Outlaw Ocean, an immersive audio documentary series that brings together more than eight years of reporting at sea on all seven oceans and more than three dozen countries. We're back with an all new second season, repeatedly risking our safety to tell stories that powerful people don't want you to know. I wanna share an episode with you from this brand new season.

It's called the Shrimp Factory Whistleblower, and it recently won a James Beard Media Award in the investigative journalism category. What started off as a dream job slowly revealed itself to be a nightmare when Josh Farinello moved to southern India to oversee a shrimp processing plant. It soon dawns on him that he's really been hired as an American face to whitewash a forced labor factory. Josh tries to understand the layers of how such a high-volume, low-cost product is even

possible. Have a listen. I'm Beefsteak Charlie and I'm warning you, my free shrimp and salad bar could ruin your appetite. Shrimp! Shrimp. Shrimp. Shrimp. Shrimp. Shrimp was once a delicacy, saved for special occasions.

But since the 1980s, it's become a staple of all-you-can-eat buffets at seafood chains across America. To keep up with demand, the US imports billions of pounds of shrimp every year, and India now provides more than a third of that. According to researchers, this high-volume, low-price model has left the shrimp industry rife with abuse as farming, processing, and packaging the product has been outsourced to countries with lax oversight and questionable human rights records. My name is Josh Farinella and I've been in the seafood industry for about 11 years. On October 29th, 2023, Josh landed in Amalapuram, which is a city in Andhra Pradesh, India.

Amalapuram sits on the Bay of Bengal, about halfway down India's eastern coast. It's a small city with a population of less than 100,000 people. Josh Bollingham, Director, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC,

CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, CBC, C And I would be at a factory that was supposed to be a temporary factory that Choice was leasing, that Choice retrofitted for their shrimp productions there. When Josh says Choice, he means Choice Canning. They're one of India's largest shrimp exporters. In 2023, Choice shipped more than 80 million dollars worth of shrimp to the United States. My first real red flag was the text message I got in the middle of the night from the manager who was there working the overnight shift telling me there was a woman running through the compound

trying to escape. This manager went on to say we were eventually able to, you know, corral her and get her to go back to the dorms and we'll sort this out tomorrow. I mean, it kind of freaked me out because I've never heard of such a thing. It seemed very wrong. I'm used to if somebody doesn't want to be at the factory you just walk out the front door go home. That was the first time I realized that's not the case there. The next morning I get to the office I asked what was happening with this. It was explained

to me that she's gone home. You know, again, part of the red flag about this is from initial text message to when we had that meeting, we're probably only talking about five hours. Like how is, you know, in this little five-hour window, how is this already resolved and she's gone. in this little five-hour window, how is this already resolved and she's gone? Over the coming months, Josh Farinella learned that this incident was just the tip of the iceberg. According to Josh, at Choices Factory in Amalapuram, the pressure to meet production quotas led to overcrowded dorms, unsanitary conditions, labor abuses, forged audits, and the use of illegal antibiotics. He was shocked by what he saw,

and he decided to do something about it. He came forward and told the Outlaw Ocean Project what he'd seen. Josh handed us a massive trove of documents. It included secret recordings, he'd made photos from inside the plant, copies of internal audits, as well as over 6,000 emails and 1,400 pages of WhatsApp exchanges. At the end of the day, I think it was just an overwhelming feeling of kind of combined

disgust and sadness. You know, disgust in terms of this company that I thought was the best of the best. I mean, the way that the labor force was treated over there was atrocious. It's not something that should be happening, you know, at kind of this day and age. That's just unacceptable. You know, something had to be done and I was in a position where I was able to do something about it. Early in 2024, I was sitting on a ship in the Antarctic with Ben Blankenship. He's the staff videographer for the Outwell Ocean Project. We were at sea for a couple weeks working on a different investigation about whales when I got an email. The email was from a guy named Josh. He was letting me

know that he had seen some pretty shocking things at a major shrimp processing plant in southern India. He told me that he knew about the Allo Ocean project because he had worked for another seafood company that we'd previously investigated and he said that he had thought through that experience that we were fair and trustworthy. I wrote him back and we started to talk almost daily for several days via satellite phone. And it became pretty clear that this was a huge journalistic opportunity, not one I could pass up. You know, Josh told us that he was planning to leave his job in a matter of weeks.

So we needed to get over to India fast or else the opportunity to see the plant and to verify the conditions would be lost. So Ben and I at that point kind of had a reckoning with the captain of the ship and asked him, is there any way he could let us off the ship so that we could go chase this other story. He said there was one commercial airstrip in Antarctica and that airstrip had on average two flights a week, but they were really unpredictable as to when they would take off because it was hugely weather dependent and he would drop us off near the airport, but we'd have to figure it out from there. off near the airport, but we'd have to figure it out from there. You know, we convinced the captain to let us off, but it was a pretty dangerous gamble. We had no camping gear, no extreme cold weather gear.

Antarctica is a cold place and we had no plans for lodging. So we got dropped off. We marched in, found the first nearby building, happened to be a Russian science station, knocked on the door. Amazingly warm, open folk who spoke decent English let us in. And from there, we scrambled to set up a flight off the island, get a ticket, and then figure out how to march our way to the airport. We were also trying to figure out how we were going to get not just out of Antarctica, but to India. And we had to apply for visas and figure out the flight path that would lead us there.

In the end, I got my visa rejected, probably because I had a bit more of an online footprint. And it was pretty obvious I was a journalist and investigative journalist. And so they blocked me. Ben had a lighter footprint and he was allowed in the country which was a really great news that we got one of us in. Ben flew immediately from Antarctica all the way to India and made his way to the plant to meet Josh. Ben was able to verify so much of what Josh had told us, but more importantly, to some degree, he landed the footage that brought the story to life.

I mean, I guess it's no secret at this point that I've got a interesting past, I guess you could say. Josh is a soft-spoken 45-year-old with a neatly trimmed beard, a shaved head, and full sleaze of tattoos running up both arms. He was raised in a former mining town in Pennsylvania by a Vietnam veteran and a social security worker. Josh's life went off the rails when he was younger. He picked up convictions for drunk driving and trying to cash false checks.

And for a while, he lived on the street. But by 2015, he turned things around. Living in Northeast Pennsylvania, there was a company that had just opened up a manufacturing facility there, and it happened to be Choice Canning. So I got in there as a just general production laborer through a temp service. You know, after about 90 days, I got hired on as a production supervisor. From there, I made my way to production manager and eventually into quality assurance management at that facility. Josh liked the work, found he was good at it, and kept moving up in the industry.

He took a better job with another seafood company, Lund's Fisheries. Then in 2023, he went back to Choice Canning. That's when he took the job in Amalapuram, India. So my job title over there was the general manager of the entire compound itself. So I wasn't just responsible for production. I wasn't just responsible for, you know, import, export. I was responsible for all of it. The only people I reported to were the owners. Choice has corporate offices in two big Indian cities, Kochi on the southwest coast of the Indian Ocean and Chennai on the southeastern seaboard. It also has a factory in Jersey

City, New Jersey. If you want to understand the scale of the Indian shrimp industry, you don't have to look much further than the Amalapuram factory itself. You can't see much from the outside. It's I mean, there's about an eight foot concrete wall surrounding everything. So yeah, you just see like a concrete compound. I mean, the place is pretty much like its own city. This is a compound that's bigger than a football stadium and it only processes and packages one thing. That's shrimp. Massive amounts of it.

The finished product out of this facility is already in retail packaging. The quota was 40 finished containers. Each finished container is about 33,000 pounds. Just to clarify, that's 40 shipping containers of packaged shrimp leaving the factory every single day. If you needed to ship a container of 33,000 pounds out, you actually needed about 66,000 pounds of raw material to come in. So, you know, multiply that 66,000 by 40 and that's the amount of material that was supposed to be going through that building each day.

Processing seafood is a race against the clock to prevent spoilage. So the plant runs more or less 24-7. There's also not a lot of automation in shrimp processing. So this means that the factory relies on an enormous amount of labor to meet those quotas. On any given day, there were 1,100, 1,200 workers on site. The plant is staffed by two different types of laborers. The first group are the migrant workers. They live on site.

They stay there year round in the dormitories. Pretty much their entire life happens at the factory. The second group are the local workers who live in the local villages and they come in every day for their work shift and then they go home. Choice doesn't recruit directly. Instead, they rely on third-party labor contractors to provide them with enough workers. Amalapuram itself is a pretty poor area.

The area that these migrant workers were coming from, or even worse off. So I mean, they were coming from, you know, the poorest of the poorest of the poor. That means places like West Bengal. The migrant workers in Amalapuram were mostly women. Many of them came from the lowest social caste and were also illiterate. One of Josh's responsibilities was to oversee that workforce. So when Josh got to the plant, the first thing he did was to look at the size of the workforce, how their contracts were set up, and what their living conditions were like. He took a look at some of the third party audit reports that Choice had filed and noticed

that some of the numbers just seemed off. When I'm reviewing these audit reports, they always had the same thing in common where there's a section they ask how many workers do you have? You know, do you only use workers that are housed on site? Do you use local workers that you bring in? And the answer was always the same. It was we don't use any local workers and we only have 225 or 250 migrant workers living on site. So it seemed very strange to me that, you know, we've got 650 people here, why are we telling everybody else we only have 200 and change? Eventually, I was making my way through the the dormitory and the, youory and the canteen facilities and realized

we only have enough beds for 450 migrant workers on site. With too many people and not enough beds, workers were expected to share. If I'm working day shift and you're working night shift, while you're at work, I'm sleeping in that bed. While I'm at work, you're sleeping in the same bed. So, people don't actually have their own beds to sleep in. The more Josh looked around the factory, the more red flags he found. Josh told us that workers had to provide their own bedding, which meant they'd often sleep on bare mattresses.

And if there weren't enough beds to go around at any given moment, they'd have to sleep on the floor and use rolled up clothes in place of a pillow. Bed bugs were an issue. There was a heavy infestation in the workers mattresses. It really didn't seem like it was taken that seriously. There weren't any new mattresses ordered. It was, you know, the mattresses that already had the infestations were just sprayed and then that was right back to sleeping on them. Hygiene problems at the plant weren't limited to the dorms. Ah, the sanitary conditions in the kitchen were very bad. There were bugs visible, you know, everywhere you look, running, scurrying across the floors, in the corners, in the food, underneath the food storage. The bathrooms weren't much better than the kitchen.

The plumbing didn't always work. The showers didn't always work. Josh had been given a tour of the plant when he first got there. But once he started looking around on his own, he realized that there were entire sections of the factory that he hadn't been shown. There's a staircase at the end of one of the buildings. It's an external staircase, so it's visible.

And I would always see people walking up and down the staircase. And if you're far enough away from that building and you look up, you could see clotheslines with you know laundry hanging on it. I thought it looked kind of strange so I decided to walk up the staircase. So you get to the top of the stairs and on your right hand side you know on top of this maintenance building there's another building it looks like it should be it looks like it should be a storage room. You know you walk inside of it and the only thing

that are there are a few bunk beds. There are people in all of the bunk beds, but there's not enough bunk beds for the people. So then you have everybody sleeping on the floors as well. It's hot, it's poorly lit. I mean, there's four bathroom stalls next to that dormitory that all have broken doors and bad plumbing, showers that didn't work. In terms of living conditions, that was probably the most eye-opening thing for me. Worst of all, the secret dormitory was located directly above the plant's ammonia compressors.

The ammonia compressors, they operate all of the refrigeration for the factory. The health risks of having any kind of ammonia leak are huge. I mean, that's possibly deadly. So to have people sleeping pretty much right on top of them is concerning. Likewise, if a fire broke out, those stairs, Josh mentioned, would be the only way out. I got the feeling from other management that were there and the HR team and everybody that some of them knew it was wrong and they also knew that you're not going to fix it. That's just the way this is.

Again, the Amalapurim plant was constantly trying to keep up with production quotas. So despite not having enough beds to accommodate the workers they did have, the factory was still chronically understaffed. With no space in the dorms to add more resident workers, Josh needed to attract more day laborers from the surrounding area. We weren't getting enough local workers. So that's when I decided, you know, let's take a look at the numbers here. And if I mean, maybe we could offer them more of an incentive to get people to come in.

You know, they were getting paid 350 rupees per day. I proposed an increase to 400 rupees per day. After I did that, somebody from HR said, hey, you can't do that. If you're going to increase them, it has to be up to 400 and I think it was 454 or 455 rupees per day, because that's the required minimum wage that they have to make. Kind of threw me off because now I know we're paying far less than minimum wage. 450 rupees is about five US dollars. Josh showed us an invoice from a labor contractor and a separate email exchange between managers

and they both seemed to confirm that some workers were paid only three hundred and fifty rupees a day, which is a little over four dollars. He raised the issue of wages with executives at the plant and word got to the company's CEO, a man named Joe's Thomas inside the company he goes by JT. You know, JT followed up with an email, I can't believe this is happening at one of my businesses. You know, I always pay people what they're supposed to be paid.

And within the hour that same, you know, VP of HR replied, included the legal team on the reply and said, sir, we paid them exactly how you told us to pay them. And there was no reply after that. I don't know if it was the final straw, but it was very close to it where I could really step back and say, this is bullshit. Soterios Johnson This kind of exchange would become a pattern while Josh was there. He or other middle managers would identify a problem. It could be bed bugs, a safety issue, a faulty refrigeration unit, anything really. He'd bring it to senior management and then nothing. He told us he felt like his hands were tired. He was blamed by management for anything that went wrong, but he couldn't get the authorization

he needed to make changes that might actually fix things. This was especially hard when workers appealed to him directly. Josh told us about one migrant worker in particular. Her job involved reporting production numbers to a WhatsApp group every half hour. And they would send these numbers to me and I would always ask, you know, or say, hey, you know, thanks for reporting this, good job, you know, keep it up. And then I would occasionally ask, is everything okay?

Josh said that after a bit of back and forth, this particular worker started to open up to him. She was able to explain to me that, well, she's been away from home, you know, working here for two years. She hasn't had a day off in over a year, and she really wants to go home. She really misses her family. I mean, it kind of progressed from there where I was trying to find out what the real situation was. But every time I would ask a question, you know, where it seemed like she wanted to tell me, I would get a response that I think was from somebody else. I know that sounds strange,

but these communications were with somebody who speaks very, very limited English. I asked if everybody there is okay, and, you know, got a response back that says, yes, everyone is absolutely okay with I think was a smiley face emoji. It was it was kind of concerning and it made me you know really hesitant to ask anything else because now I kind of feel like that conversation is being monitored by somebody

who is not her. Sit, sit, relax. Sit, the chairs are comfortable. not her. In January 2024, Josh recorded a conversation between himself and two labor contractors at the plant. In the recording, you can hear the contractors confirming what the worker had told Josh in their WhatsApp exchange. Josh recorded a separate conversation with the plant's welfare executive that outlined how little freedom the migrant workers who live at the plant actually have. In essence, in this exchange, you've got the welfare executive explaining

that sometimes workers will say they want to go home and the contractor will stall. You know, the response was, well, we'll convince them otherwise. You know, we'll just get them to stick around for a little while and, you know, after a week or two weeks, they'll forget they wanted to leave. Josh took this to mean that the migrant workers will often just resign themselves to not being able to leave, and they won't ask again. The welfare executive goes on to explain, these stalling tactics don't always work, and some people try to leave without permission.

But they can't. That's because anyone trying to leave needs something called a gate pass. To get a gate pass, you need approval not only from a supervisor or labor contractor, but also from the plant's HR department. So it's pretty rare that a worker will actually get one when they ask. The labor laws over there really aren't a whole lot different than they are here in the states. Employment is still freely chosen. You're free to come and go as you please. If you don't like the job, you can leave the job. There's really no

difference between there and here on paper anyway. But in the practical application over there, then no, no, they're not free to come and go. There was a situation where there was a hole in the wallets around the compound and workers were just leaving through there So I have to think if gate passes were that easy to get then nobody would have been you know Leaving through a hole in the wall You searched for your informant who disappeared without a trace You knew there were witnesses but lips were sealed who disappeared without a trace. You knew there were witnesses, but lips were sealed.

You swept the city, driving closer to the truth, while curled up on the couch with your cat. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover heart-pounding thrillers on Audible. Hey, how's it going? Bear to imagine when you listen. Discover heart-pounding thrillers on Audible. Hey, how's it going? Amazing! I just finished paying off all my debt with the help of the Credit Counseling Society.

Whoa! Seriously? I could really use their help. It was easy! I called and spoke with the credit counselor right away. They asked me about my debt, salary, and regular expenses, gave me a few options, and helped me along the way. You had a ton of debt and you're saying Credit Counseling Society helped with all of it?

Yup, and now I can sleep better at night. Ha ha ha! Right on! When debts got you, you've got us. Give Credit Counseling Society a call today. Visit NoMoreDets.org. I think it can be easy, sometimes at least, for us to have a sort of out of sight, out of mind attitude towards the types of things that Josh says he saw at Choice's plant in

Amalapuram. Our main concern as consumers is usually the quality of the finished product. We want to know that what's on our plate is safe, healthy, produced to a high standard and being sold to us at a good price. We can't literally see labor abuse on our plates, even if what we're eating is tainted by it. And that makes it hard to pay attention to it. And furthermore, we trust that the supermarkets, restaurants and brands that we buy from will be ethical and that all the certifications and labels that go in the packages, well, we trust that those things, you know, that they mean something. Choice Canning presents itself to the public as a responsible, transparent operator in an industry that researchers say is rife with labor abuse, forged audits, and deceptive

supply chains. They market themselves as a brand you can trust. But Josh says that what he saw at Choice Canning's Amalapuram factory contradicts all of this, and that Choice's practices in India have had very real consequences when it comes to the safety of the shrimp that makes it to the U.S. Josh says that this was especially true when it came to the use of antibiotics. Globally, roughly half of the seafood eaten comes from aquaculture, where animals are farmed in close quarters and sickness is common.

This is true of shrimp, which are grown by producers in huge industrial tanks or man-made ponds, with up to 150 shrimp occupying a single square meter. This is why aquaculture farmers, including shrimp farmers, resort to using antibiotics. The widespread use of antibiotics in agriculture is driving a rise in cases where people are getting sick with infections that are resistant to medicine. As a response, the US, Europe, and Canada have all made it illegal to import seafood that's been treated with antibiotics. In 2019, the US Government Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that close to

three million antibiotic-resistant infections occur each year in America, and those infections killed tens of thousands of people. The Amalapuram factory purchases shrimp from a number of different farms. Since antibiotics aren't illegal everywhere, some farms in India still use them. That means that shrimp needs to be tested before it's sorted and packaged for shipping to ensure that choice hasn't received any tainted shrimp from its suppliers. Antibiotics, as per the FDA, are not permitted on any imported shrimp. Choice's public stance about the use of antibiotics is they're not in anything we pack.

They're not in anything we buy. We test, you know, rigorously. Everything we purchase, we test. And if there's antibiotics there, we reject the shipment or we destroy the shipment. So again, on paper, you know, the policy is we're doing the right thing. The reality of the situation is go ahead and pack it even if it is antibiotic positive and ship it to the U.S. Josh says that shrimp that tested positive was treated the same as everything else and would often leave the factory in packaging with antibiotic-free labels. Discussions around antibiotic tainted product happened so often at the plant that management came up with a code word to

use internally. They called it Oscar. The first time that antibiotic shrimp were mentioned to me, the first time I was told hey they're in the factory and they're packed. I sent a WhatsApp message to one of the owners and I said, hey, we've got this and this is antibiotic positive. The response back, you know, almost immediately is we don't say that. We use the word Oscar. I mean, the thought process behind using it is, you know, if anybody questions it, you could say it means anything. We asked Josh who authorizes shipping out this tainted product.

My boss, Jacob. He's one of the owners. Jacob is Jacob Joes, the company's vice president of sales and procurement. He's also the son of the CEO who goes by JT. Josh showed us WhatsApp exchanges where he informed Jacob that 225 cases of raw shrimp that were headed to all the South supermarkets in the US were Oscar, which means they tested positive for antibiotics. Jacob's response was simply, quote, ship it. According to an inventory spreadsheet that Josh gave us, Choice Canning's Amalapuram facility received over 250 tons

of antibiotic positive shrimp in 2023. It's hard to say exactly how much of this shrimp made it to the US, but other company documents seem to show instances where antibiotic positive shipments made the full journey. We checked, and the FDA's own data indicates they've tested shrimp from Choice Canning for antibiotics just 21 times since 2003 and never found a violation. In that same period, Choice has sent more than 100,000 tons of shrimp to the United States. The FDA is, I mean, they're just not equipped to sample everything that comes in. And that's not just in terms of the shrimp that Choice Canning is shipping over here. That's, I mean, just in general, there's absolutely no way that they will ever be staffed enough to take any kind of samples that would represent everything that's coming.

You know, if Choice is shipping a container that's 32,000 pounds and only 10,000 pounds of it is antibiotic positive, well, now your chances are even less likely that the FDA is going to find it. All the things that Josh described to us, the living conditions, illegal labor practices, health and safety violations, antibiotics, all of it. These are things that should have been detected by the inspectors carrying out independent audits. But they weren't. In January 2024, Josh and the rest of management were preparing for a visit by inspectors from Aldi South.

Aldi is a huge multinational with 12,000 stores around the world. In the US, they also own Trader Joe's. Josh recorded a conversation discussing how to prepare for this inspection. So basically we'll call them when the auditor comes in, we'll call them and say, go run away and do something else for the day. All right, good, good, good.

How the hell did you come up with that idea? How the hell did you come up with that idea? How the hell did you come up with that idea? So the duty is keeping me on my neck. Ideas will come. What he said is, you know, JT sir has a knife to my throat about this. The managers were concerned about the number of workers in the plant on the day of inspection.

That's because auditors who oversaw the plant would want to check the number of employees that Choice reported against wage records, available beds, and the amount of workspace on the factory floor to see if there were any concerns related to underpayment or safety. Josh was told that in the past, Choice had rented a facility away from the plant and simply moved excess workers off site to hide them while the inspection took place. Josh There was no literal knife to that man's neck. To me, that's, you know, everybody knowing this is very, very wrong, but make it work for these two days that the auditors are on

site. Mike There wasn't enough time to make the necessary arrangements to move workers off-site during the Aldi South inspection. So management came up with another plan. Simply open the back doors and tell the workers to leave the premises for the day. You know we'll have to open up the back door of the compound so that we could let people out without having anybody see them. Josh said that the independent inspectors didn't seem particularly concerned with catching actual violations. As long as things looked good on paper, they were happy.

You know, just show them some pretty stuff on paper and nobody's going to ask questions about the rest. And, you know, in this case, you know, for the all the audit, the quality assurance manager said this, you know, 70% of this is all lies anyway, just basically put on the good show. Choice Canning has been able to pass any number of audits and on-site inspections. For example, in November 2022, Choice Canning announced it would be the first Indian company to become a corporate member of the Global Seafood Alliance. It often

goes by GSA. It's an industry body that promotes responsible practices. The GSA offers its own certification, Best Aquaculture Practices, or BAP. This certification means that every stage of a seafood supplier's production line has been inspected and approved. Choice Canning's Amalaporum plant was BAP certified. And Choice said that many of the shrimp farms that supplied Amalaporum were as well. Well, the one set of books for the auditors said, yes, everything we have is coming from certified farms. And in reality, none of it was. Given what Josh has seen firsthand,

those certifications only go to show how fundamentally flawed the entire oversight system actually is. Because it's all about just getting the piece of paper there. In my experience over in Amalapuram, it was just going through the motions. Nobody truly cared about the process, the procedures,

making sure you were putting out safe food, that the labor conditions were what they were supposed to be. It was more like going through the motions and that was all. And it really didn't seem to be like much of a secret to anybody. During Josh's time at Choice Canning's Amalporum plant, he received a steady stream of messages about hygiene issues and spoiled products. However, Josh says that when he attempted to improve conditions of the plant, his efforts were stonewalled by senior leadership. To Josh, they seemed mostly concerned with how much revenue the plant was generating. I think me being hired in that position at the Amalapuram factory was simply to whitewash

the operation, was to put a legitimate looking American face on it while it did what it did. After seeing the conditions at the plant and coming to terms with the scale of the problem, Josh decided that he needed to leave. scale of the problem, Josh decided that he needed to leave. My wife and I discussed it. And then while she was visiting me in India, you know, we sat down again and we talked and we decided that the day her flight was to come back to the States, it would probably be the best thing for me to book a flight back, you know, at the same time. We were sitting at the airport in Hyderabad, India. I sent my resignation email from the airport there.

He flew back to the US, retained a lawyer, and filed a formal whistleblower complaint to the FDA and other federal agencies. He wasn't sure what good it might do, but he wanted to state on record what he had seen. I was very surprised with how quickly it took off and, you know, how many people were paying attention to it. One of the biggest things is the Department of Labor has now added shrimp from India to their list of goods produced with forced labor. But what is kind of upsetting, and I knew I ran the risk of kind of being blackballed

from the seafood industry, you know, going into it. But where, you know, a year and a half ago, plenty of seafood companies would have been calling me up on a regular basis asking me to come in and run their quality assurance departments. Now, when I submit a resume to any of them, I don't, I can't even get the courtesy of a rejection email. So that, I mean, that's upsetting, but you know, we'll see. Maybe, maybe that'll change over time. Josh stayed in contact with some of his colleagues at the plant. One told him he was also quitting.

The hours were ruining his marriage and he'd been receiving threats from locals over wage disputes. Josh also reached out to other managers about the Aldi audit. He was curious to know what had happened. Had they simply opened the doors and sent workers to hide for the day? One responded, yes, they had. Quote, exactly, sir. We presented our findings to the Global Seafood Alliance, the organization that gives out the best aquaculture practices certification. They said they take them seriously and will investigate if they find evidence

of violations. The FDA did not respond to a request for comment. Choice Canning categorically denied Josh Farinella's allegations through their lawyers and said that he should not be trusted because of his criminal record. They claim that documents provided by Josh were manipulated. We had those documents analyzed by a third-party forensic analysis firm. It refuted Choice Canning's claim. On the subject of antibiotics, their lawyers wrote that the company never ships antibiotic shrimp to the U.S. and that the FDA has never stopped their shipments due to antibiotics because the company maintains the highest of quality standards. They said that internal correspondence about Oscar shrimp does not indicate the antibiotic shrimp was shipped abroad

since this shrimp is tested a second time and likely was found at that stage to be antibiotic free. Finally, their lawyers said that Choice always pays its labor contractors on time and likely was found at that stage to be antibiotic free. Finally, their lawyers said that Choice always pays its labor contractors on time and the plant has passed its labor audits, verifying that wages as well as working in wage conditions are proper. You can read their full response at theoutwallocean.com slash choicecanning response. The choice canning shrimp facility in Amalapuram is one specific example of how offshoring seafood production allows companies to hide labor, safety, and health violations. Things that until now have gone largely unreported.

But we can't rely on outliers like Josh Farinella to tell us what's happening from the inside. That's not a model that can possibly scale up to a global level. And to be clear, processing plants are just one part of a multi-billion dollar seafood industry that connects the furthest reaches of the planet. So, what happens when you follow the entire supply chain from bait to plate? In the coming episodes of the show, we tackle a giant, China, the world's seafood superpower. Our groundbreaking investigation reveals brutal human rights abuses, forced labor, and sexual assault. That's next time on the Outlaw Ocean.

This series is created and produced by the Outlaw Ocean Project. It's reported and hosted by me, Ian Urbina, written and produced by Michael Catano. Our associate producer is Craig Ferguson. Mix, sound design, and original music by Alex Edkins and Graham Walsh. Additional sound recording by Tony Fowler. For CBC Podcasts, our coordinating producer is Fabiola Carletti. Senior producer, Damon Fairless. The executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is the senior manager and Arif Nourani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

Special thanks to Josh Farinella and Ben Blankenship. To see more reporting from this story, including the full length print version, copies of internal documents and communications, as well as a documentary film with footage from inside the Amalapuram factory, please visit theoutlawocean.com and follow the link to India Shrimp, a growing Goliath. That was an episode from the Outlaw Ocean Season 2, and it's just one of the four new investigations this season. If you liked what you heard, you can find more episodes from the Outlaw Ocean wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes

drop weekly until July 23rd and be sure to follow the Outlaw Ocean feed so you don't miss an episode.