Sometimes you learn of an unintended consequence of seemingly good idea wreaking havoc on an ecosystem. I would not put fishing with "plastic bottles filled with explosives" into that category.
I will offer a counterpoint. Japan has extensive fishing within its territorial waters (economic exclusive zone). It has some of the most productive fishing in the world, in part, thanks to the Kuroshio current. Japan does not need to use dynamite fishing, and yet, raw fish prices are incredibly cheap in Japan for a huge variety of fish. Their prices are much cheaper than other highly industrialised nations.
I'm a scuba diver here in Thailand and you can still see blast fishing damage from decades ago that never fully recovered. It's truly as terrible as the article makes it out to be.
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?
Thanks for sharing your first-hand account of diving in Thailand. I think they should aggressively pursue coral planting. They are several projects in Indonesia that have demonstrated excellent results. I volunteered for a day doing coral planting in Bali, Indonesia. As part of the dive, they take you to different parts of the coral reef as it recovers, showing you how it changes year after year. You can see the change with your own eyes.
My first encounter with the concept of bomb fishing was the Shapoklyak episode of the soviet cartoon Cheburashka, produced in the 70s. It's been around.
What a low value comment. In this case, a European football (soccer) field/pitch is reasonably close in size to an American football field. If the article had used square feet or acres, your comment might be more relevant. Google tells me that FIFA football pitch size is 105 meters long by 68 meters wide (7140 sq m). American football field size is 110 meters long by 53 meters wide (5830 sq m).
I'd suspect that the goal isn't to destroy coral reefs and the damage is "accidental." And/or the reefs are already largely fucked, so additional damage is "minimal."
We truly deserve to get extinct. There's nothing but selfishness and greed from Wall Street to San Francisco to the Indonesian fisheries and Indian farms.
Ahistoric defeatism. Embraces our nature, instead of fleeing for the hills of utopism. Learn to steer it, change it.
We accomplished wonders- humanity is calm and peaceful compared to what it once was.
The gaming industry and cellphones alone have pacified a species whose footprint is ever shrinking. Literal monks with hypnotic glowing stones, this whole industry is a miracle and has given nature a breather it would not have had without it.
Note that the selfishness of the farmer or fisherman may in certain light differ from the greed of the capitalist, if one’s family endurance depends on it.
If you read the article it’s pretty clear this is greed and short sighted thinking
> 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.
To those replying that it’s feeding starving children read the article. The equipment to do this isn’t accessible to poor fishermen. 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.”
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
RTFA, they say they it's not poverty, the explosives and boats involved mean that it's not the desperate doing this. It's greed, the sooner we can be less paternalistic about this kind of stuff the sooner we can start addressing these kind of problems. It's like India or china being major polluters, they need to be held accountable just like the west holds/held itself accountable.
blunt comment but not technically wrong - it's likely poverty and subsistence living that's driving adoption of this 'technique' and much of that originates from a combination of the colonial carve up of Indonesia [0] in combination with the weak and easily exploited position of the country within globalized economic markets [1]
>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.
>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.
That's addressed in the article? The claim made is that this is more a way of middle-income market-trading fishermen increasing their catch and profit. Those at the bottom can't afford the necessary explosives.
that's an uncited claim framed as a guess, not confirmation or even a more educated guess by people performing actual ethnographies and larger demographic analysis. pair it against both the fact that these bombs are easy to make (plastic bottle + explosive) and the stronger kinship ties of families and villages, it's not impossible to imagine groups pooling money to purchase fertilizer on the gray market
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
Yeah, why go through all of the effort to blame this on colonialism? Maybe these people just suck and don't care/don't know any better. We can't make everything a problem of colonialism.
> While fishers predominantly use the method to catch fish for sale at local markets — identifiable by their ruptured internal organs and burst swim bladders
The article agrees, assuming "here" is global north tech workers.
What's the point of this post? if you're trying to shame people into vegetarianism it's not going to work, and I'm one myself.
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"
Sometimes you learn of an unintended consequence of seemingly good idea wreaking havoc on an ecosystem. I would not put fishing with "plastic bottles filled with explosives" into that category.
Otherwise how would people have cheap fish? All these abuses, useless subsidies and exploitation is the reason why meat and fish are cheap.
Cast a net or eat tempeh. It being convenient doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do it.
Casting a net is actually one of the less sustainable ways to fish.
Think you might be casting too wide a net there. It certainly can be.
Why is this downvoted? It is a reasonable comment.
I'm a scuba diver here in Thailand and you can still see blast fishing damage from decades ago that never fully recovered. It's truly as terrible as the article makes it out to be.
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?
Thanks for sharing your first-hand account of diving in Thailand. I think they should aggressively pursue coral planting. They are several projects in Indonesia that have demonstrated excellent results. I volunteered for a day doing coral planting in Bali, Indonesia. As part of the dive, they take you to different parts of the coral reef as it recovers, showing you how it changes year after year. You can see the change with your own eyes.
File this under the category "people are f-bomb-ing idiots".
I wouldn't be surprised if social media was spreading this technique as successful way to fish.
My first encounter with the concept of bomb fishing was the Shapoklyak episode of the soviet cartoon Cheburashka, produced in the 70s. It's been around.
Yeah it’s been around for a while but it’s been at the individual level not at the commercial scale which makes the practice way worse.
"With a bomb dropped once every 62 minutes, the equivalent of three football fields of reef are destroyed each year, according to Williams."
That doesn't sound right.
I love the American measurement units. How many bald eagles of explosives are needed to destroy three football fields worth of reef?
What a low value comment. In this case, a European football (soccer) field/pitch is reasonably close in size to an American football field. If the article had used square feet or acres, your comment might be more relevant. Google tells me that FIFA football pitch size is 105 meters long by 68 meters wide (7140 sq m). American football field size is 110 meters long by 53 meters wide (5830 sq m).
You’d be surprised how vulnerable aquatic organisms are, and how far energy travels in water after an explosion…
I think the point is the opposite, I also expected a lot more damage from a bomb every hour
I'd suspect that the goal isn't to destroy coral reefs and the damage is "accidental." And/or the reefs are already largely fucked, so additional damage is "minimal."
I would assume the area was larger than reported. I mean that's 24*365 bombs per year.
I'd assume the deployment isn't always over reefs?
Low-cost acoustic sensors paired with community reporting usually beat complex tech solutions when enforcing marine boundaries in remote areas.
We truly deserve to get extinct. There's nothing but selfishness and greed from Wall Street to San Francisco to the Indonesian fisheries and Indian farms.
Amen. Humanity had its chance. We have blown it. Let the cockroaches get their turn.
Ahistoric defeatism. Embraces our nature, instead of fleeing for the hills of utopism. Learn to steer it, change it. We accomplished wonders- humanity is calm and peaceful compared to what it once was.
The gaming industry and cellphones alone have pacified a species whose footprint is ever shrinking. Literal monks with hypnotic glowing stones, this whole industry is a miracle and has given nature a breather it would not have had without it.
Let's not forget the scorpions. They also deserve a turn.
They would do the exact same as humanity given the tech. Natural organism doing natural things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henderson_Island_(Pitcairn_Isl...
The scorpions and cockroaches will have to fight it out. Life will go on.
Note that the selfishness of the farmer or fisherman may in certain light differ from the greed of the capitalist, if one’s family endurance depends on it.
If you read the article it’s pretty clear this is greed and short sighted thinking
> 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.
Those are nothing but excuses.
Destroying habitats and the future of fellow fishermen for short-term gain is just selfishness and greed.
Desperation is no excuse.
To those replying that it’s feeding starving children read the article. The equipment to do this isn’t accessible to poor fishermen. 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.”
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
Easy to say when it’s not your child facing starvation. The long term doesn’t matter if your family isn’t going to make it another month.
RTFA, they say they it's not poverty, the explosives and boats involved mean that it's not the desperate doing this. It's greed, the sooner we can be less paternalistic about this kind of stuff the sooner we can start addressing these kind of problems. It's like India or china being major polluters, they need to be held accountable just like the west holds/held itself accountable.
Say that again when your children are starving.
Thanks to these assholes destroying entire fisheries, I might not have to wait long.
Anything beyond ascetic maximalism will be cast as greed to the naturists and malthusians.
There's always someone out there who is going to make the argument.
Send them some subsidies from those large American coffers then, and they won't need to
blunt comment but not technically wrong - it's likely poverty and subsistence living that's driving adoption of this 'technique' and much of that originates from a combination of the colonial carve up of Indonesia [0] in combination with the weak and easily exploited position of the country within globalized economic markets [1]
[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.
That's addressed in the article? The claim made is that this is more a way of middle-income market-trading fishermen increasing their catch and profit. Those at the bottom can't afford the necessary explosives.
that's an uncited claim framed as a guess, not confirmation or even a more educated guess by people performing actual ethnographies and larger demographic analysis. pair it against both the fact that these bombs are easy to make (plastic bottle + explosive) and the stronger kinship ties of families and villages, it's not impossible to imagine groups pooling money to purchase fertilizer on the gray market
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
Yeah, why go through all of the effort to blame this on colonialism? Maybe these people just suck and don't care/don't know any better. We can't make everything a problem of colonialism.
> it's likely poverty and subsistence living that's driving adoption of this 'technique'
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.
How big of a boat do you think you need to scoop up some fish?
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.
I bet many of the people here moaning and whinging eat fish themselves!
I bet almost nobody here eats bombfished fish. <0.1%
> While fishers predominantly use the method to catch fish for sale at local markets — identifiable by their ruptured internal organs and burst swim bladders
The article agrees, assuming "here" is global north tech workers.
No fishers, no food.
Incoherent, broken logic.
No bombs, no fishers.
What's the point of this post? if you're trying to shame people into vegetarianism it's not going to work, and I'm one myself.
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"