Yesterday Congressman Donald Payne (D-NJ) mentioned on NPR's All Things Considered that the pirates operating off the Somali coast grew out of chaos that descended on the region in the l990's. He said one of the costs of that chaos was environmental piracy -- overfishing and toxic dumping. To wit:
"What's happened in the country, of course — there's virtually been no employment because there's been no government," Payne says. The situation has allowed lawlessness to flourish.
On top of that, he notes, foreign vessels have depleted fish in the area, and foreign ships have used the waters off the coast of Somalia as dumping grounds for toxic waste for years. "No one wants toxic waste in their country," Payne says.
Some experts trace the rise of piracy in Somalia, in part, to fed-up fishermen who organized to fight illegal fishing and dumping, before discovering the lucrative benefits of piracy.
This fits well with what a Somali pirate named Sugule Ali told The New York Times over the weekend: He said that so far, in the eyes of the world, the pirates had been misunderstood.
“We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” he said. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.”
Of course one can't take criminal self-justifications too seriously, but Somali diplomats partially back the pirate's claim:
The piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago, Somali officials said, as a response to illegal fishing. Somalia’s central government imploded in 1991, casting the country into chaos. With no patrols along the shoreline, Somalia’s tuna-rich waters were soon plundered by commercial fishing fleets from around the world. Somali fishermen armed themselves and turned into vigilantes by confronting illegal fishing boats and demanding that they pay a tax.
“From there, they got greedy,” said Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat in Kenya. “They starting attacking everyone.”
By the early 2000s, many of the fishermen had traded in their nets for machine guns and were hijacking any vessel they could catch: sailboat, oil tanker, United Nations-chartered food ship.
What do you suppose the chances are that environmental piracy will be mentioned on commercial TV or radio reports about these attacks?
(h/t: Treehugger...photo via War is Boring)
