Piracy in Somalia had been a threat to international shipping since the beginning of Somalia's civil war in the early 1990s. Since 2005, many international organizations have expressed concern over the rise in acts of piracy. Piracy impeded the delivery of shipments and increased shipping expenses, costing an estimated $6.6 to $6.9 billion a year in global trade in 2011 according to Oceans Beyond Piracy (OBP).
According to the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), a veritable industry of profiteers also arose around the piracy. Insurance companies significantly increased their profits from the pirate attacks, as the firms hiked rate premiums in response. Since 2013, piracy attacks have decreased in the region due mostly to patrolling by the navies of countries across the world, especially India, China and EU Navfor Operation Atalanta (a joint operation of numerous European navies).
Even so, governments and organizations continued to attempt to address the root causes of piracy instead of deterring pirates with law enforcement measures. Through a combination of these measures and changing political climate, piracy off the coast of Somalia was at an all-time low since the peak in 2010–2011.Gilmer, Brittany."Fishermen, Pirates, and the Politics of Aid: An Analysis of the Somali Fishermen Registration Programme." Geoforum 77 (2016): 106. However, some scholars maintained that the key to keeping the piracy rate low was through a combination of economic and political solutions that targeted the root causes of piracy.
Obstacles to ending piracy
The obstacles to ending piracy were varied and complicated, requiring more than the mere threat of law enforcement to combat piracy. These obstacles included:
Corruption: Piracy required political order to function, including a strong but corrupt host state to allow for the complicated provisions of piracy. Sarah Percy argued that “there is no reason to assume that a more developed Somalia would be a Somalia without pirates.”Percy, Sarah and Shortland, Anja. "Contemporary Maritime Piracy: Five Obstacles to Ending Somali Piracy." Global Policy 4, no. 1 (2013): 65–72. Organized crime groups often thrived in strong states, owing to corrupt and symbiotic relations with police in countries like the United States and Japan. When pirates shared ransoms with political elites to curry favor and that ransom was used to provide necessary revenue, these regional leaders had little incentive to stop piracy.
Lack of Alternative Employment: Many pirates and potential pirates lacked alternate forms of employment in the area or only had access to less lucrative opportunities. The costs of piracy were vastly outweighed by the benefits, as a single hijacking could result in a ransom of $500,000 to $9 million in a country with a per capita income of $220 in 2009. Without suitable sustainable alternative employment options, pirates would continue risking the costs of piracy given the incredible benefits. Also, piracy is an industry itself that supports those who work in tangentially related businesses and the families of those people, making it more than a single profession to replace.
Victims of piracy: Unlike other organized crime groups that harm the local community, pirates primarily targeted outsiders like large foreign shipping vessels and supported their local community by providing employment and revenue. Rather than destabilizing the region, piracy worked with regional clan hierarchies to provide stability and protection without harming members of the community.Marchal, R. "Somali Piracy: the Local Contexts of an International Obsession." Humanity, 2, pp. 31–50.
Practices of Shipping Companies: The policies of shipping and insurance companies regarding anti-piracy measures could encourage piracy itself. Shipping companies calculated that the chance of a ship being attacked by pirates was low while anti-piracy measures could be expensive. Insurance companies made the same calculation, and charged low premiums for ransom insurance assuming that there was a low chance of a ship they cover actually getting hijacked. The ships then sailed without much protective equipment measures and almost guaranteed ransom payment from the insurance company, making them easy and lucrative targets for pirates. For example, the liquefied petroleum gas tanker Feisty Gas was captured by Somali pirates in 2005 and ransomed for US$315,000; By 2012, pirates were demanding ransoms in the millions USD, as high as US$50 million for the Panamanian oil tanker Damani Cargo. While different groups of pirates surely negotiated different ransom amounts, the willingness of insurance companies to pay those ransoms only allowed for the ransoms to increase in price.
Law Enforcement and Innovation: As navies and law enforcement ships developed new ways to stop piracy, pirates adapted and developed more efficient techniques and technologies to counter them. R. Marchal argued that antipiracy efforts would not eliminate piracy, but lead only to more violent and costly forms, creating a deadly trap similar to the American "war on drugs". Given the extreme monetary cost of military and private protections for vessels and their low effectiveness, inventing new ways to keep pirates off ships by force would only continue the cycle of piracy without solving the root cause and addressing the need for law enforcement in the first place.
Development-based solutions
Piracy historian Thomas Keating argued that Somalia required a top-down solution to piracy given the variety of issues caused by the political vacuum in 1991 and the economic downturn caused by the tsunami of 2004. These conditions required effective political authority and improved economic opportunities from the government to address the root causes of piracy. Without permanently altering the cost-benefit calculations of piracy through structural and institutional change, the incentives to continue piracy would remain unchanged. One way to increase the cost of piracy for pirates is through increased military patrolling of the region, but this remains expensive to maintain without treating the underlying conditions that lead to piracy. While law enforcement was a protective short-term solution, long-term solutions could be found in on-shore responses that targeted the root causes of piracy in terms of political stability and economic development.Keating, Thomas. “The Political economy of Somali Piracy.” The SAIS Review of International Affairs; Baltimore Vol. 33, Iss. 1, (Winter/Spring 2013): 185–191. DOI:10.1353/sais.2013.0009.
Emphasis on the Somali fishing industry
Since the 2010s, the Somali fishing industry has become the focus of these development-focused solutions, particularly given its relationship to the piracy industry. Before 1989, Somali fisheries were growing into a thriving and reliable industry, bringing in about US$15 million in exports of fishing products. After a series of droughts ruined the country's grazing lands in the 1970s, the Somali government began actively supporting the fishing sector by organizing fishing villages into cooperatives. The cooperatives provided gear and supplies to fishers and set standard prices for fish, giving fishers “a more stable and viable financial stake." However, the outbreak of civil war in 1991 and the subsequent years of violence halted this institutional progress.Glaser SM, Roberts PM, Mazurek RH, Hurlburt KJ, and Kane-Hartnett L (2015) Securing Somali Fisheries. Denver, CO: One Earth Future Foundation. DOI: 10.18289/OEF.2015.001
Though export markets for lobster to the Middle East and shark to Asia remained throughout the 1990s, the Somali fishing industry was further hurt by the actions of foreign illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing vessels. These vessels plundered the waters off the coast of Somalia, depleting them of their most valuable stocks while damaging the ecosystem with dredging. These vessels were often fishing for highly migratory species like tuna, or more localized species like lobsters and squids. Foreign vessels targeting tuna and similar species were primarily "large, industrial longline vessels from Asian and European distant water fleets," or were smaller gillnet vessels from neighboring countries such as Yemen and Iran. Both kinds of vessels were much larger than the handlines, nets, and beachseines used by artisanal Somali fishers, and depleted the fisheries much more unsustainably.
A 2015 report by Sarah Glaser called Securing Somali Fisheries argues that foreign fishing could provide important revenue if it were properly licensed and sustainably managed, and that revenue could be reinvested in domestic fishery development. However, fishes caught by these vessels are not reported to the Somali government and artisanal fishers blame their declining catches on these large, industrial vessels. Additionally, IUU vessels have been accused of attacking Somali fishing boats and deliberately destroying their fishing gear. Without institutional protection or support from the international community, some fishers formed groups who “targeted foreign fishing vessels and commercial traffic” to steal equipment and other items if the opportunity arose. But these attacks soon escalated, leading to the first reported hijacking for ransom in 1994 of two Somali High Seas Fishing Company (an Italian-Somali joint venture operated outside the country) fishing vessels.
This stress on Somali fisheries was then compounded by the tsunami of 2004, caused by an earthquake in the Indian Ocean. The tsunami displaced 50,000 people in Somalia and destroyed about 650 kilometers of coast, flattening key fishing infrastructure like boats, piers, and roads in coastal villages. The tsunami also damaged key coral and mangrove habitats, further damaging ecosystem already ravaged by the IUU vessels.Schryer-Roy, Anne-Marie. "Reflections on the 2004 Tsunami." Adeso, 22 December 2014; "Somalia," World Health Organization, Somalia.
The relationship between these artisanal fishing villages, actions by international industrial fishing vessels, and piracy makes these villages an opportune target for anti-piracy focused development. However, one of the difficulties of targeting these coastal villages is the need for bottom-up solutions that integrate the customs and practices of these communities to create lasting solutions.Pollnac, Richard et al. "Chaos, Conflict and Change: The Reemergence and Evolution of Fishery Governance in the Small Scale Fisheries of Somalia." Ocean and Coastal Management 162 (2018): 193–201. Anthropologist and political scientist James Scott in Seeing Like a State outlines how states can do more harm than good when they attempt to regulate their people without regard to regional practices and cultural norms.Scott, James. Seeing like a State How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale Agrarian Studies. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1998. This idea applies to the small coastal fishing communities in Somalia, where clan relationships and agreements govern much of private and public life. In terms of piracy, the mass income from a successful ransom is distributed along these clan relationships and supports the entire community, not just the few pirates engaged in the act. Similarly, in order to effectively develop the Somalian small fishing industry, organizations must consider the perceptions of these fishers towards their own fishery. Given the regional variations from community to community, a single authoritarian top-down approach is more likely to fail than a bottom-up approach reliant on distinct cultural norms and existing practices for a more formal governance system.Pollnac, Richard et al. "Chaos, Conflict and Change: The Reemergence and Evolution of Fishery Governance in the Small Scale Fisheries of Somalia." Ocean and Coastal Management 162 (2018): 193–201.