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#fishing#more#fish#bomb#indonesia#thailand#here#article#poverty#coral
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Discussion (190 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
What is interesting is that both Indonesia and Thailand have strong and similar anti blast fishing laws since early 00s that charge 5+ years of prison time.
However, Thailand has been much more successful with taming blast fishing which is practically gone now and the story here is very insightful.
Some of it is due to Thailand's geography and high demand for marine tourism but the biggest push here was EU and US regulation that gave Thailand opportunity to shape up. In 2015 (same year when Thai anti blast laws were codified more strictly) US TIP (trafficking in persons) report down-graded Thailand to tier 3 mostly due to fishing slave workers while at the same time EU's IUU (illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing) issued a yellow card. All of which lead to the biggest fishery reform in Thai history which mostly eliminated blast fishing.
Since then Thailand is back to tier 2 of TIP and got lost the yellow card from EU's IUU. Indonesia never got tier 3 of TIP despite many arguing it should have and never got a card from IUU. Stories like this turn me into a globalization believer - I know it's not perfect but the system is kinda working?
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Livingseas+Coral+Restorati...
[2] https://www.reefrestorationbali.com/
I know you mentioned Indonesia never got the yellow card it should have and that certainly creates less incentives for them to straighten their act. But I am trying to understand if the government is still largely to blame or not?
all blast fishing is a failure of governance so I'd say yes but the fishing cultures here in SEA are so different from anywhere else in the world so it's very hard to govern without strong central body. Lots of cultural, religious, poverty and spiritual stuff mixed into all of that which really complicates things.
IMO Thailand has a much stronger centralized government and just better geography to make enforcement easier. It's mostly mainland with coastlines while Indonesia is mostly islands which are notoriously difficult to govern. So to answer your question, it's probably just that incentives in Thailand go much further due to all of these variables.
In Fiji, for example, no fisherman could get dynamite if they wanted it. The only way to get that is if you run a (very heavily regulated) mine, or a quarry, and you'd have to account for every blast.
Situation you describe is not unique for former colonies all around the world, how breakup of former empires was generally handled is the peak of colonial incompetence and worse, and most of Africa and Middle east are a huge mess due to that.
Its one thing when one draws a nice square around Wyoming for example, another when such straight line makes you suddenly part of country led by your rival tribe, with different religion, priorities and often outright hate towards you (and usually long history of violent conflicts to build upon).
As far as I know these are not usually larger boats with captains and workers, more single famlilies who own small craft.
The best way to stop bomb fishing is to give locals a reason to preserve the habitat, like what you see in places like Tulamben.
That doesn't sound right.
However, I will now refer to explosives exclusively in units of Bald Eagles when referring to their mass, and "star spangles" when referring to their energy output.
UK should not hold us back with their shenanigans.
advanced question for the college types: how many if you supersize it?
Man kind - If we can, we will.
It’s leading us to do insane things damaging our own health and the environment, nevermind how much suffering it’s causing the actual sentient beings we’re using.
To incentivize them to stop you have to give them better options. In this case, teach a man to not fish with explosives and you’ll feed him for the rest of his life.
Why make excuses for greedy jackasses? Their ancestors didn't invent this 5,000 years ago and it's the "oNlY wAy they can survive." They fished without bombs once. Some guy realized this depraved method works, so now lazy people choose to do it so they can get money faster than the people fishing legitimately can. That's why it's illegal.
In a world where all wealth accumulates at the top and leaves the bottom in precarious conditions, perversions like these are inevitable and could be resolved by treating human needs as priorities and make sure everyone has their needs met, which with todays productivity we could easily accomplish if we all worked together instead of against each other.
I wouldn't be surprised if social media was spreading this technique as successful way to fish.
Visit Bali and you can find square km's of rubble that used to be reef off the shore of pretty much every beach.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N0VrHQ-cHUA&
>how to
Dynamite goes into the water, fish goes belly up, 90% of the catch is lost. It's not rocket science.
the coral is a tragedy of the commons things; it's a sweet deal for lazy fisherman.
Fishermen were doing this in Indonesia decades ago. Pretty well known technique.
I know that seismic survey acquisition should be easily identifiable because those shots occur at precise intervals during the survey and continue all day long with no breaks unless there is an equipment failure or other reason to shut down. A 10 second interval would be one common example.
The damages from activities like this are terrible. Using explosives as a seismic sources was banned in the late 1970's I think due to harms done to marine mammals and organisms and the environment in general. Since then, airguns firing compressed air have been the dominant marine seismic source. Depending on the bandwidth of the bubble created and the volume of the airgun array they can also be extremely destructive to marine mammals like whales and porpoises so crews employ biologists as whale watchers in those areas where activity can be expected so that the effects on whales can be minimized.
It is still a serious issue in offshore exploration though.
Bomb fishing is something I would expect to hear about from some redneck coon-ass from Lousyana. I guess that people everywhere figured out how to stun fish to improve catch quantities and some use that as the primary method now. Maybe if deeper waters weren't fished out they could just go further offshore. Once you have foreign fleets dragging up everything in their paths then the only fish left are around the reefs.
https://youtu.be/EXqPHM7Uauk?t=0&si=-W6-z4L8UEo4KtgS
I hate the idea but this article makes me optimistic that other proactive measures that are not mentioned might be restoring a lot more than this.
Read critically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_fishing
Expect more elephants to be slaughtered as a result of Elon Musks teardown of USAID.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfishing#Examples_and_evide... has several examples of prior ‘art’, and I don’t think that list is complete. Herring almost became extinct in the Atlantic in the 1970s, for example.
And that’s only fishing. Other examples include the passenger pigeon, the American bison, and the dodo.
The difference between the first world and the rest of the world is that the first world has more sympathy for the non-existing, abstract humans from the distant future.
Why so quick to make excuses for selfish and mind-bendingly stupid people? Why are you assigning guilt on the “rich west” for a local practice that is for local consumption? Not every indigenous practice is good. Some are the reason those communities can’t escape poverty. It’s not colonialism or oppression, their problem is stupidity.
> It’s not colonialism or oppression, their problem is stupidity.
bingo
The article addresses that objection.
The people want better for themselves, similar to people here. Since this is speaking about people in Sulawesi, they don't really have any money or work there. It's largely jungle, mining, farms.
I'll just give an example with some of the people i spend time with whenever I'm in Indonesia.
Eko lives in his village. He largely has no real job or work. He catches fish sometimes. Different ways. Sometimes with rod. Sometimes he shimmies an air tank with an air pipe underwater and spears them. He might get bends and die of the pains of it. I told him he shouldn't fish like that, but he still does it.
You see, Eko does crazy things because wants his two kids to live better than him. He wants them to live more like those folks in Jakarta, with air conditioning and sanitary toilets. Eko thinks his life isn't great, but he makes do with it. He largely does not have a vehicle besides a weak scooter, he brings his kids together with. His hut is poor, and he built it himself with concrete and bamboo. No electrical. He defecates into a hole toilet he learned to build from his friend. Sometimes he defecates into the river.
Eko's father died recently. The father likely died of poor treatment. The hospital is about 2 hours away in the main city. The hospital is poorly run. Its red lights make you feel ill; there is barely any materials or equipment.
Sometimes he thinks he needs to bomb something to get more fish. It doesn't ever get him enough money because he needs a lot more than he does get from it. Even if his wife works on her tobacco farm, there is very little at the end of the month. Maybe his kids will die too in that same hospital. Some of my friend's kids died in similar fashion last year. Maybe an earthquake will happen again, and all the stuff that they've been doing will just be burnt away.
Poverty. It's uh, quite bleak.
I’m sure if you told an indigenous tribe you were planning to do this they’d agree that it’s stupid, yet here we are.
> While understudied, the incentives for the use of dangerous dynamite fishing are often falsely attributed solely to poverty and desperation. The cost barrier to buying boats, bombs, and detonators means it’s more likely a practice for middle-income fishers, according to experts.
“A combination of factors drives blast fishing, including ineffective enforcement and management,” said Hampton-Smith, highlighting how indiscriminate the explosions are, killing all manner of species, regardless of age, size, or intent.
Destroying habitats and the future of fellow fishermen for short-term gain is just selfishness and greed.
Desperation is no excuse.
I’d argue this practice hurts poor fisherman more than helps as coral reefs are important nurseries for fish and reliable sources as well. Blowing them up will rob communities of shallow fishing grounds and future fish
There's always someone out there who is going to make the argument.
[0] https://law.wm.edu/academics/intellectuallife/researchcenter...
>Centuries of Dutch control produced an ethnic and economic caste system familiar to many colonized peoples. Compared to some imperial powers, Dutch policy was less focused on “Dutchifying” the indigenous population, with most attention paid to resource extraction and maritime strategic advantage.
[1] https://archive.org/details/ahmad-nashih-luthfi-muhammad-fau...
>The short cut to development that the New Order took was highly depending on foreign loans. Consequently, development models were very much shaped by the foreign institutions that became the source of finance for Indonesia. At the end of the 1980s for instance, the World Bank forced for the project for the construction of Kedung Ombo Dam [...] The construction of the Dam had caused thousands of people and tens of villages to be evicted and involuntarily resettled. The Dam became the symbol of prestige for the New Order. When the New Order regime collapsed, the dam was abandoned and gradually left to dry.
you'd have to imagine that higher earners would easily be able to navigate out to deeper waters with better boats whereas lower income would stay in shallower waters which is noted as largely where this is happening
From the article:
> While understudied, the incentives for the use of dangerous dynamite fishing are often falsely attributed solely to poverty and desperation.
> The cost barrier to buying boats, bombs, and detonators means it’s more likely a practice for middle-income fishers, according to experts.
None of those things cost a lot of money and the return on investment for just affording a single bomb pays for itself almost immediately.
The article agrees, assuming "here" is global north tech workers.
There's basically one solution to bomb fishing: make it economically nonviable. You could ban it an punish the people doing it, which is often the immediate action taken and seems like the path being set up here...
but really any money spent on enforcement may be better spent on setting the bomb fishers up with the tools to make a living doing something else — ironically "teach a man to fish"