Rethinking Thailand’s seafood supply chains
Full Journal Article: Vandergeest, P., Kadfak, A., Melo, C. et al. Methodological nationalism and labour justice in seafood supply chains. Maritime Studies 24, 47 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40152-025-00441-0Blog post by Tawanrat Marit, Just Seafood's Research AssistantWhen discussing labor rights in Thailand’s fishing and seafood industry, most studies tend to pay attention only to what’s happening within Thailand’s borders. But the thing is that seafood doesn’t stop at borders. It’s part of a massive, global supply chain that stretches across oceans.
Through the lens of ‘methodological nationalism’ and ‘territorial trap,’ this article argues that by focusing only on the nation, we’re missing the bigger picture of how global trade, migrant labor, and international companies shape what happens on the ground. And this aspect is particularly important among labor justice advocates and policymakers.
To capture what’s actually going on in the labor situation in the Thai fishing and seafood industry, this paper offers an approach to map out the full picture of seafood industry in Thailand and the international market. By doing so, we can see that the roles of multinational companies, international buyers, and migrant workers all play a role in shaping labor conditions in Thailand’s seafood processing industry.
Methodological nationalism and Territorial trap:
The central argument of this paper is to critique the previous studies on Thailand’s seafood industry and labor justice, as they often over-emphasize Thailand as a self-contained system. As a result, those studies underestimate the connection to the globalized market and international dynamics in Thailand’s seafood industry.
Rooted in methodological nationalism, the scholars often assume that labor activities and production only happen within the national border. Additionally, the previous studies are also based on the territorial trap, which portrays the state as the only meaningful political and economic actor while undermining how global supply chains operate across and beyond national boundaries.
Although both concepts have been widely critiqued in migration and global labor studies, they continue to shape the understanding of labor in Thailand’s seafood industry. This has obscured the global realities of exploitation.
To grasp the realities in this industry, the authors invite us to zoom out and offer a lens to see the picture that captures international dynamics, shaping working conditions and realities of the industry in Thailand.
Transnational and Complicated Supply Chains:
One of the most common misunderstandings about Thailand’s seafood industry is that seafood products from Thailand are treated as if they were made of fish captured in Thai seas. In fact, raw materials for seafood processing come from different regions.
When looking at canned tuna production, Thailand imports large quantities of tuna from the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and processes them in industrial zones like Mahachai. Then, they re-export the finished products to the Global North countries. In fact, Mahachai has been a major seafood landing port and processing center since the 1970s–1980s, and by the late 1990s, Thailand had become a leading global exporter of canned tuna and shrimp.
As of 2020, Thailand’s total seafood exports were worth 6 billion USD, according to FAO records.
“As a sector, seafood processing capital in Thailand is concentrated and internationalised— concentrated because the sector is dominated by a few very large companies, and internationalised because these companies operate transnationally and are oriented to international buyers.” (Vandergeest et al., 2025)
Mahachai Port, Thailand's most important seafood processing hub. Picture from Bangkok Post 2016
This internationalization also extends to business structures. Large Thai firms are closely tied to international brands and global retailers, shaping production processes in ways that reflect foreign market demands, labor standards, and trade agreements. In all, this paper points out that the Thai seafood industry is not only concentrated among a few major firms but is also deeply embedded in global value networks, a significant feature that is rarely addressed in domestic labor justice frameworks.
The industry is notably large, with over 1,000 registered processing companies located in Mahachai, including major corporate producers. Additionally, there are small unregistered plants in these areas that provide outsourced tasks to larger companies, such as shrimp peeling. This job is primarily performed by migrant workers, many of whom work outside formal labor protections.
These workers, often from neighboring countries, are a vital part of the supply chain, especially on ocean-going vessels and in informal processing hubs. Yet, they’ve been largely overlooked in past studies that focus only on labor within the Thai state's reach. Moreover, these fisheries operations depend on transnational migrant workers, which is another aspect that was not well recognized in the previous studies.
Zooming out, it becomes clearer: Thailand functions as a node in a larger global production system. Fish may be caught in one country, processed in another, and consumed in a third, while workers, wages, and regulations move unevenly across those borders.
Migrant Workers in the Hidden Sectors:
Most research about labor justice in Thai fisheries targets employees in the onshore processing factories – merely focusing on the label “Made in Thailand.” However, the larger and vulnerable reality is that an industry-wide significant proportion of the workforce is migrant labor, many of whom employed in informal, under-regulated, and even off-book parts of the supply chain.
Take shrimp peeling, for example. A significant number of migrant workers from Myanmar and Cambodia are working for unregistered backyard operations, serving the transnational processing firms. Often, they are women and/or undocumented migrants. In this sector, the workers have to perform long hours of work for a minimum payment. And due to the informality, they normally don’t have access to social protection or formal legal protection, the most crucial aspects of labor rights.
Furthermore, migrant workers from the Philippines and Indonesia are also working in distant water fishing for the foreign companies that supply raw materials to Thai seafood processing plants. Operating overseas on the purse seine vessels and albacore longliners, they are far from law enforcement. They are prone to labor exploitation and other forms of human rights abuses. The common experiences included forced labor, withheld wages, and denial of access to basic services.
As the records suggest,
“The monthly wage (before deductions) for work on Taiwanese and Korean DWF fishing vessels is about USD 550 per month; wages on Japanese vessels are a little higher, and they are significantly lower on Chinese vessels. Workers thus appropriate only a small proportion of the value of what they are producing.”
As much of the labor justice advocacy work focuses on activities in Thailand, they have missed the bigger picture: migrant workers abroad who also provide their labor in the seafood industry. They were often excluded from academic analysis and Thai policy intervention. Through examination of the whole supply chain, from the ocean to the point of export, we can begin to understand how power and responsibility are diffused, and how solutions must take on these cross-border dynamics.
The picture unpacks the global seafood supply chain, showing how raw products move from international waters (often hired transnational crews), are sent to processing hubs like Thailand (reliant on transnational labor), and eventually export to a wide array of international buyers.
Conclusion:
Understanding Thailand’s seafood industry through a global lens changes how we think about labor justice. Instead of taking ‘Thailand’ only as a unit of analysis, this paper invites us to unpack a connection between suppliers, buyers, and border labor flows that shape the seafood processing industry in Thailand.
These global dynamics also challenge the notions of methodological nationalism and territorial trap that have been dominating the field of this study. This lens is ultimately useful for the labor justice advocators and policymakers, as it offers the approach for analyzing a complex, global production system that Thailand is a part of.