“Pirates Feel Patriotic Duty To Go After Tuna Boats”ff

Below an opinion as expressed by StrategyPage.com

The Somali pirates are driving up the price of Tuna.  Indian Ocean tuna fishing is a $6 billion a year industry, with hundreds of boats working off the east coast of Africa. Pirates will seize the fishing boats, even though they these vessels bring a smaller ransom than the larger merchant vessels.

But ransoms as high as a million dollars have been paid for tuna fishing boats. This has driven up the coast of insurance, and many boats avoid the increase by staying away from the Somali coast. This has caused the catch to decline about 30 percent in the last two years.

This has caused a major recession in the ports in the region that supply the fishing boats with fuel, other supplies and services. Many of the pirates feel it is their patriotic duty to go after the tuna fishing boats, which are destroying the tuna stocks off the coast by overfishing.

Since there is no Somali government to regulate the fishing, the large boats (up to 6,000 tons) take all the tuna they can get. Populations of some fishing species have already collapsed, and will take a decade or more (if ever) to revive. The smaller Somali fishing boats can't compete with the larger fishing ships from Europe and East Asia.