Written by Shao-Yun Chang, Vanny El Rahman, and Beatrice Zani
Image credit: Coastal vessels in Ao’di Port, Northern Taiwan. Provided by Shao-Yun Chang.
On a scorching hot spring day, we drove across the newly opened Danjiang Bridge (淡江大橋) and headed to Xiaguzi Fishing Port (下罟子漁港) in Bali District, in Northern Taiwan. The pedestrian walkways of the bridge were packed with visitors marvelling at the infrastructural spectacle spanning the Tamsui River. “Coming to Xiaguzi used to take so long. The bridge has cut travel time by a lot,” said one of us. Although a mere stone’s throw away from the bustling bridge, Xiaguzi was quiet and deserted. The fishing vessels swayed lazily, and fishers sought shade in the afternoon heat. As we walked along the quay, a vessel owner saw us and looked puzzled. Seldom did visitors travel to the remote fishing port. Xiaguzi lacked scenery, seafood restaurants, or live seafood markets often found at other ports along Taiwan’s northern coast.
We struck up a conversation with the vessel owner as he watched his Indonesian fishers clean the vessel. Like many other small fishing vessel owners, he relies heavily on migrant labour from Southeast Asia to sustain his fishing business. Taiwan’s fishing sector is heavily dependent on foreign workers, the overwhelming majority of whom come from Indonesia and the Philippines. According to the Fisheries Agency of the Ministry of Agriculture, as of the end of 2025, more than 32,000 foreign crew members were employed across Taiwan’s distant-water and coastal fleets, with Indonesians accounting for the vast majority, followed by Filipinos and Vietnamese. Not surprisingly, as is the case with many other economic sectors, migrant labour is indispensable to the country’s seafood industry.
The vessel owner spoke gravely about the ongoing challenges of the fishing business. The fishing yield had decreased significantly year after year. Profitable fish species were increasingly hard to find. Following the war between Iran and the US, vessel owners were also significantly affected by rising fuel costs. “After paying all the fishers, I barely have enough money left to pay my own salary,” said the owner. He pointed towards his cell phone and said, “Now they’re saying that employers will have to pay 190,000 NTD for each worker (about 6,000 USD). How are we going to afford the cost?” Although we clarified that nothing had been finalised yet, the owner continued to voice his concerns about covering costs and staying in business.
Recruitment Fees and Their Perils
The owner’s frustration stemmed from the prohibition on recruitment fees under the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART) between the US and Taiwan signed earlier this year. The prohibition of recruitment fees, or zero-fee policies, has gained strong traction over the past decade. Zero fees target the hefty fees migrant workers pay to local sponsors and manning agencies to seek job opportunities abroad. While placement fees cover a wide range of services, including job placement, transportation expenses, airfare, health checkups, and administrative paperwork processing, they can lead to debt for workers. In a conversation with a Vietnamese migrant fisher in northern Taiwan, he explained that his relative paid around 160,000-170,000 NTD (about 5,000 USD) in placement fees this year to come and work. The fee is a heavy burden for fishers, who earn only about 30,000 NTD (about 950 USD) per month. International actors (such as the International Labor Organization) have strongly denounced fees, as fees can lead to debt bondage, which can put workers in precarious working conditions. The ART is thus the latest push by labour organisations to eliminate risks of forced labour in supply chains. Nonetheless, much like the Danjiang Bridge’s overshadowing presence over its adjacent fishing ports, the ART and promises of zero costs also eclipse the vessel owners and migrant fishers who are the backbone of the fishing industry.
The ART has been hailed as a negotiation success in response to the Trump administration’s sweeping trade policies and tariffs since 2025. However, its promulgation to improve labour conditions for migrant workers in Taiwan builds on years of advocacy by Taiwanese organisations and American labour groups. Prior to the ART, a handful of Taiwanese manufacturers had already pledged to implement zero-fee policies to comply with regulations imposed by Euro-American buyers, ensuring their access to European and North American markets. Most were manufacturing giants that were part of transnational corporate supply chains, such as electronic suppliers for Apple and footwear suppliers for Adidas and other name brands and thus had a larger business scale and wider profit margins.
ART’s Impact on the Taiwanese Fishing Industry
Ever since the ART was signed in February, it has sent shockwaves throughout the Taiwanese fishing industry. Despite its benevolent intentions, the ART paints a monotonous landscape of conflating the manufacturing and fishing sectors. The latter is a far cry from the manufacturing sector, with the scale of business being one of the main distinctions.
The Taiwanese fishing industry can be broadly divided into two categories: coastal and offshore fishing, which takes place largely within Taiwan’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), and distant-water fishing, which operates on the high seas and in the EEZs of other nations. For coastal and offshore fishing, these vessels can be found along Taiwan’s coastline. They are primarily small family businesses that run same-day or week-long fishing trips. Some vessel owners employ as few as one migrant fisher on board, while larger vessels may employ close to ten fishers. Most of their catch is also directly sold to domestic buyers, including markets, restaurants, and seafood processing companies. For them, the ART is a strong blow to maintaining their business operations. As the owner from Xiaguzi noted, coastal and offshore fishing are already significantly impacted by shrinking fishing yield and rising operating costs. In many of the fishing ports along the northern coastline, owners have gone bankrupt or become too old to run their vessels. Run-down vessels are tied together with no new buyers in sight. As the ART mandates that vessel owners soon shoulder recruitment fees for employing migrant fishers, it inevitably casts a dark cloud over the struggling coastal fishing industry. The gloom also calls into question whether policies initially designed to target transnational corporate supply chains can be readily imposed on localised maritime economies.
Inevitably, the distant-water fishing industry is swept up in this new wave to improve labour conditions. Under the ART, not only do distant-water fishing vessel owners have to pay for fishers’ placement fees, but they are also asked to revise hiring practices. In the distant-water fishing industry, young male fishers from Indonesia and the Philippines make up the majority of the workforce. Despite working on Taiwan’s large fleet of squid and tuna fishing vessels, they are not considered domestic workers, unlike their counterparts on offshore vessels. Instead, they are treated as exceptional subjects, receiving lower pay (their current monthly salary is 570 USD) and fewer substantial labour rights (no access to universal healthcare). In the past decade, the working conditions on distant-water vessels have come under scrutiny from international watchdogs, prompting the industry to make changes to address criticisms of labour exploitation. However, corporate fishing companies have been quicker and more flexible in complying with these demands, such as providing fishers with internet access or on-demand telemedicine support. Following the same logic, larger fishing corporations will likely be able to weather the change, even with additional personnel expenses from salary bumps and recruitment fees mandated by the ART. The pressure might be felt more strongly among individual owners who are struggling to make ends meet as operating costs per fishing trip continue to soar.
Image credit: Distant water squid vessels in Cianjhen Port, Kaohsiung, Southern Taiwan. Provided by Shao-Yun Chang.
Notes: The data for this paper are part of the ongoing research project “Forced Labour and Migration in the Maritime Economies of Globalized Asia” (FORSEA), funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR), hosted by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), and led by Beatrice Zani, CNRS.
Shao-Yun Chang 張韶韻 is a cultural anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Her research investigates transnational migration between East Asia and Southeast Asia, focusing on multicultural policies, human rights discourse, and migrants’ access to healthcare. More broadly, her work examines the processes of racialisation and exclusion from a postcolonial perspective.
Vanny El Rahman is a doctoral researcher in Asia-Pacific Regional Studies at National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan. His research interests include migration studies, migrant labour unions, and Taiwan’s migrant worker regime, as well as terrorism and radicalism. His current research focuses on Indonesian migrant care workers in Taiwan and migrant-led unions.
Beatrice Zani is a sociologist and ethnographer and a research fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Her research focuses on transnational migrant labour in the Asian fishing and maritime transport industries (China, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia). She examines the interconnections between labour and commodity mobilities, the reconfigurations of globalised work, and the role of supply chains, informal economies, and digitalisation in the transformations of contemporary capitalism. She’s the PI of the French National Research Agency (ANR)-funded project FORSEA: Migrations and Forced Labour in the Maritime Economies of Globalised Asia (2026-2029).
This article was published as part of the special issue on Maritime Borders and Fisheries in Taiwan.