International organizations have long argued that poverty and unemployment in coastal communities are underlying causes of piracy.
Between the 1990s and 2010-as some ships began to arm themselves, and some shipping companies made deals with warlords for protection-piracy in the western Indian Ocean became far more organized, sophisticated, and lethal. In response, Somalis took to the seas to fight them off. Around the same time, EU-flagged vessels and EU-owned vessels flagged to other nations began purse seining in the Somalia EEZ. Egypt, Greece, South Korea, and Taiwan were among the nations that trawled in Somali waters in the 2000s.
Many of these ships employed habitat-destroying methods such as bottom trawling and blast fishing, or methods that routinely caught large volumes of non-target species, which would then be discarded. As Somalia plunged into civil war, foreign fishing fleets began operating inside Somalia’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), sometimes illegally. In the 1980s the Somali government resettled thousands of nomads from the drought-stricken interior to work in coastal fishing cooperatives, vastly expanding both artisanal fish production and the number of people dependent on small-scale fisheries. Prior to 1991, piracy off the Horn of Africa was more or less unknown, with far more incidents occurring in the Strait of Malacca or the Gulf of Guinea. Associate Professor, School of Foreign Service and Department of Government - Georgetown University
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