Pirates and the international community's role

While I do believe that the Somali people have been ripped off historically, I do not believe that gives them the right to illegally pirate ships, even if it were for the economic gain of the country. As Waldo explains in his article, the Somalis have lost their fishing prowess and exclusive right to their waters throughout the last two hundred years (if not earlier). The atrocities committed against Somali fishermen in the 1990s are appalling, but should be dealt with in a civilized manner. This “rape of the Somali fishing grounds” is intolerable, but the international community should be dealing with this as a matter of criminality. With the plethora of international organizations in play today, one of them could easily be tasked with enforcing the exclusive economic zone of Somali waters.

Nonetheless, the Somalis have larger problems than the measly $450 million they lose to these fishing thieves. Fish are not such scarce resources that the environment is really a deciding factor in the violence found here. The largest of these problems is their status as a failed state. In the New York Times interview, a “pirate” claimed to be acting as a coast guard for their seas. However, a “normal” professional coast guard would not have a problem with ships travelling through their seas. Yes, the ship would need to give notification of some sort, but by the law of the sea, I do not believe that they could legally prevent people from crossing their waters. Nor would a coast guard demand ransom for its captives. Its captives would be held in a prison or similar structure and dealt with in a court setting. Again, the international community could be at play here, helping Somalis bring these criminals to justice. While this might be difficult to arrange and implement, a shift in the attention on this issue could help lower instances of illegal activities, lessening the need for pirates to “patrol” their seas. Additionally, the international community should be especially worried about the potential environmental impacts of any illegal dumping in Somali waters. Dumping does not only harm the immediate neighboring countries, but can have effects on a vast region.

In such an instance, then we would know the true intentions of the Somali pirates. If pirating stopped with the international community serving as watchdogs and prosecutors of illegalities in Somali waters, then we would know that these pirates were actually honest in saying they are reclaiming what is rightfully theirs. If, however, pirating continued on legal ships, then the international community would know it was right to blame the pirates, rather than the international actors.

Honestly, I know that all of these options are unbelievably unrealistic, but I like to lay out possibilities. What I do see as a more realistic progression of events would be an increase in aid to the Somali people. Humanitarian aid in Somali is extremely hard to deliver, but if the Islamist militants could be stopped, countries could more freely help the innocent Somali people. Al-Shabaab ruins opportunities for the Somali state government to take hold and claims too many innocent lives each year. While obviously not the best comparison, Afghanistan and Somalia can be measured as similar cases of strife. As countries with difficult geography, diverse ethnic groups, religious extremism, and corrupt governance, a myriad of factors contributed to the suffering of their people. This is not to say that the United States should go to war with Al-Shabaab, but rather that maybe the international community should pay more attention to the Horn of Africa and spend more time contemplating valid solutions. To be frank, it shocks me that less has been done about this conflict considering the close proximity of Somali to vital oil-producing countries.

The Pirates’ Right to Regulate

Somali “pirates” seem to be in the news constantly, and they are always shown in a negative light.  They are shown as dangerous people who rob developed countries of their goods and weapons and threaten them with death and torture.  Before reading the articles for class, I assumed that all Somali “pirates” were this dangerous and needed to be controlled.  However, after reading the article by Mohammed Abshir Waldo, I see the two sides of the Somali “pirate” argument and am frankly more inclined to support the Somalis.  This is not to say that I support all of their various forms of piracy; I think there is a huge differentiation between those pirates who truly do steal to gain money and those who are just trying to protect their people’s natural oceanic resources, and I support those who are just trying to protect their oceans from overfishing and illegal dumping of waste.  Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing fleets from many developed countries and emerging economies (the European Union, China, and India) constantly invade the ocean waters off of Somalia’s coast and exploit Somalia’s resources in an incredibly invasive and unsustainable manner.  According to Waldo, “Somali fishermen in various regions of the country also complained to the international community about the illegal foreign fishing, stealing the livelihoods of poor fishermen, waste dumping and other ecological disasters, including the indiscriminate use of all prohibited methods of fishing: drift nets, under water explosives, killing all ‘endangered species’ like sea-turtles, orca, sharks, baby whales, etc. as well as destroying reef, biomass and vital fish habitats in the sea”.  To me, this behavior is atrocious and is yet another example of the global North exploiting the global South because they can.  The global North is treating Somalia’s waters as if they were part of the global commons because this unsustainable and illegal form of fishing is cheaper.  In reality, they should be respecting Somalia’s sovereignty like they would any other developed country. 

I believe it is incredibly important to differentiate between the real Somali pirates and those “pirates” who are really acting in the interests of the Somali people and the environment to conserve the ocean and its biodiversity for future use and protect what little resources they have for local fishermen to make a living and take care of their families.  The media and the global North need to do a much better job recognizing that distinction between the real Somali pirates and the protectors of Somalia’s resources.  Instead of exploiting the Somali coast with IUUs, the global North should be aiding Somalia in getting more resources and funding to manage their ocean ecosystems in a sustainable manner to benefit the country, future generations around the world, and to protect the fragile ocean ecosystem.  It is unfortunate that Somalia must resort to this type of violence just to protect their waters, but I do not think that it is entirely their fault that they must act this way.  They do not have the same resources as the global North to put fishing moratoriums in place or patrol the waters in a more peaceful and authoritative manner so that they can maintain their ocean resources and prevent heavy IUU activity.  The global North should be helping them create regimes to regulate their waters on a national and an international level, like a real coast guard, to even the playing field and allow Somali fishermen to survive.  Somalia has a right to regulate their waters just like any other country.

Climate Change is a Market Failure

The class dicussions we've been having about how the environment and conflict are related is so dynamic and complex. The two are so interconnected yet so separated at the same time. The different authors present so many different views: doees conflict cause environmental degradation, or does environmental degradation cause conflict? I think the answer is both. The Amazon has seen death threats over land threats, Sudan is separated by an oil crisis between the North and the South, and the Somali pirates are taking over the surrounding waters to prevent illegal fishing.

Something interesting I came across actually while doing research for our final paper was the role of economics in all of this. Climate change is the hottest (literally) topic on the global scale. It affects every single country and will only be an issue that gets solved if tackled in a global, cohesive fashion. There is so much information out there in the world that shows the detrimental effects of climate change. It could be towns sinking in the future, or the New York Times articles that show people murdering each other over forrest land. The immediate effects are bad enough as it is, some of the worst civil wars around the world have to do with natural resources. For our paper, we are focusing on South East Asia and analyzing the effect of climate change in that region. They are probably the most suceptible region to the effects of a changing global climate. One article I read was about the role of  the market which I believe relates greatly to our class dicussions.

The world cares about money. They care about business, they care about profit. If the world wants people to care about the Amazon, about the blood diamonds, and aboout the failed state of Sudan, you have to make it about money. The article I read posed action towards climate change as the "greatest market failure" in the entire world. Until the global community can set up a market structure revolving around climate change that is profitable, we won't see any change. If you want governments to act and work together they need a market environment. Right now anything with climate change is too high-risk with extremely vague outcomes and therefore no one is investing. While getting someone to invest isn't that easy, investments and creating a new market are the only way the world is going to react and act to reverse climate change. Developing coutnries respect the Chinese because they approach them as they approach a business, yet the United States is shelling out cash towards projects that often fail and attempting to set up unstable governments in failed states that will also fall through. The United States needs to change their mindset: global development for the sake of the environment has the potential to be a profitable business and there will be no change until we start treating developing worlds as business projects where we have a goal to create a good finished projects through investments that allow these people to build their own countries.

Resource Curse

In class we discussed the resource curse, the role oil companies play in it, and what the role of other countries to help fix the problem. From my understanding, the resource curse occurs when, in an under developed country, one resource is abundantly available and the main source of money for that country. This can lead to many issues for development, government and conflict.

Oil is often the natural resource associated with the resource curse. Oil is exported out, and those countries importing then have refineries in order to make the oil usable. These countries place a high demand on these cities to get the oil since it is used in such high quantities, which is likely a contributing factor to the resource curse. Possibly to alleviate some of this pressure, oil importing countries could import from multiple countries instead of only a few. Even though if all the importers spread it out, the exports would end up to be the same, a schedule could be implemented so that the exporters do not have to export such high quantities so often. Another possibility for alleviation could be a cap on exports or a cap on income taken in on the export of one resource. This would incentivize diversification of exports so that these countries are not so heavily reliant on just the one resource. Diversification would push the exporting countries to produce more crops or other resources that could be use as exports and thus alleviate stress on producing such great quantities of just one resource. This would also help with avoiding depletion of the resource. Oil companies are thought to perpetuate the resource curse cycle, and this could be fixed by having the oil producing countries refine their own oil. This would add jobs to the country in the refineries. Also, the control over the oil would be spread out so much further, and not just in the hands of a few. It would lessen the chance of the military controlling the resource, since many more people would need to be involved in order to refine before it could be exported.

Other countries could play a role in fixing the curse. For oil in particular, the big importers of oil could decrease their demand. This is obviously much easier said than done. This would involve developing a different fuel source to be used on a large scale, and thus far I don’t think we have an option for that. Countries could ban booty futures so that it would be illegal for rights to be bought for an oil well in case of a future war. Maybe the importers, who are typically wealthier countries, could offer some kind of incentive to have these countries work towards better governments and enforcement practices. Also, like the suggestion earlier of the exporting countries being the ones who refine the oil, the wealthier importing countries could offer money, or offer a loan to the exporters to develop and construct a refinery in order to help their government and economy run a bit more smoothly.

The Poverty Trap: Environmental Implications

“Inequality”.  It is becoming a bigger and bigger buzzword these days.  In the United States, we spend a lot of time talking about the increasing wealth of the “top 1%”, income inequality, and wage inequality.  On a more global scale, we talk about extreme poverty and inequality, the inability the access natural resources and the bare necessities for survival.  These conversations are all related to the idea of the “poverty trap”, a concept that I have been learning about in my development economics class.  Basically, in an economy where there is inequality and credit markets are imperfect (also known as all world economies), inequality reproduces itself.  Poor parents do not have the same ability as the wealthy to invest in things like education and health, thus making it more difficult for their children to succeed.  Due to the inability of poor parents to accumulate capital, the poverty trap makes sure that their children also do not have any capital to help them invest in education and health the way the wealthy do.  Thus they must continue to struggle just to maintain enough income to survive.  It is a vicious cycle and a market failure that bars the impoverished from investing in goods and futures that everyone should have equal access to.

However, when we talk about the poverty trap and inequality in the general media, we do not often link it to increasing environmental degradation.  Colin Kahl says, “At both the global and local levels, natural resource depletion and environmental degradation result from interactions among extreme wealth, population pressures, and extreme poverty”.  In less developed countries where the current exclusive political institutions allow for an extremely high level of poverty, where wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a few, there is also a higher level of environmental degradation.  When families are so incredibly impoverished, their main focus is survival, day to day.  This leads to an inability to accumulate capital and knowledge for parents and their children.  The inability to accumulate capital leads to a lower level of interest in environmental protection because families need to use all the resources they can to survive.  For example, there is a fuel wood crisis in Africa because families are growing and rapidly harvesting wood to fuel their stoves.  Also, a lack of knowledge and the inability to obtain education makes it impossible for the impoverished to learn more about environmental issues and family planning.  The poverty trap can be applied specifically to environmental issues because poverty contributes to environmental degradation, which in turn worsens poverty.  Extreme poverty and declining resources can lead to civil strife and resource conflicts, such as the Zapatista uprising that happened in Chiapas, Mexico due to the unequal distribution of land that made it difficult for the indigenous peoples to accumulate any capital from farming and harvesting the land.

So what is our solution to the poverty trap?  Will alleviating the poverty trap allow us to better protect against environmental degradation?  In my opinion, there is a huge need for social consensus and public intervention on the issue.  For example, public investments are needed in education and early childhood development, taxes for the wealthy must increase, and political and financial institutions must be re-vamped to make way for inclusive instead of exclusive institutions.  These changes need to happen before environmental degradation so undermines the power of state authority and legitimacy that civil strife breaks out.  Uprisings like the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas may cause regime and institutional change if they occur on a large scale, but this is not the ideal solution.  In terms of protecting against environmental degradation, I think alleviating the poverty trap is one part of the solution.  By allowing the poor to accumulate more capital and invest more in education and health, they will be able to focus more on conservation and sustainable use of the environment as well as better family planning and more investment in their children’s futures.

I wanted to take an analytical look at the Homer-Dixon research and his views on the role of environment and violence. I think that Homer-Dixon takes a really interesting approach in one of his first conclusions: that scarcities of renewable resources can produce civil violence, but that environmental scarcity mainly act by creating social effects- that are often misinterpreted as a conflict’s “immediate cause.”

I think that his statement here is extremely valid, but I’m also not sure if the two can be separated so easily. Scarcity naturally is going to cause social issues-I don’t think it’s possible for it to not cause social issues. While I agree, the social issues lead to violence, I’m not sure if it is fair to separate the social from environmental in this case. The environmental issues are social issues because they strain everyday life. The social issues wouldn’t arise without scarcity issues and together, they cause civil violence. However, I do agree that the social aspects of scarcity are highly linked to the environment. People don’t realize the scarcity until something being gone affects their everyday life, and once everyday life and social norms are changed, violence often ensues to attempt to gain social status back.

I think that Homer-Dixon’s idea about resource capture is very relevant and one of the few of his conclusions that the global-North can essentially relate to. Dwindling resources puts power distribution in the favor to those with a grip on the resource. Often, the North can look at the south and see food scarcity and water scarcity, but can in no way relate seeing as we have faucets with clean running water 24/7. But what happens when the resource is something that affects the global north, my thoughts lying on oil and diamonds. All of a sudden, the U.S., for instance, has a stance in the power distribution of those in charge of the oil distribution. Granted, as we discussed in class, much of our imports of oil come from Canada who remains peaceful, however, the US has a high stake in the industry itself. Our economy is so dependent on oil in everything we do, that if prices rise to an abnormal amount, we are looking at an economic tragedy. I think that Homer-Dixon only looks at this in terms of the poorest groups and how this affects them. I believe that this idea affects some of the world’s largest economies and should really be the driving force behind positive global development

I think a lot of Homer-Dixon’s conclusions are however, not monumental. He makes a lot of conclusions about social factors and I think that so much of his analysis is on social norms that we already understand as a part of society.  While yes, he places it in the environmental context, he isn’t unique in how he applies them and how they are specifically different from other social pressures. For instance, I think his separate conclusion that environmental scarcity is connected to weak state in poor countries. I think it’s just a bit trite- just about every poor country is corrupt to some extent (even the richer countries can be included) that a weak state has much more to do with other factors and not just the environment. Clearly environmental distinction will separate social groups- just as just about any other aspect of society. Everything contributes to one group being more powerful than another. I think that is a fact about everyday life, not a distinct conclusion about the environment.

The ingenuity-gap and Homer-Dixon

I wholeheartedly disagree with Homer-Dixon’s final pessimistic anti-cornucopian rationale. He states: “The most important of the seven factors above is the last: growing population, consumption, and environmental stresses will increase social friction. This will reduce the capacity of policymakers in developing countries to intervene as good social engineers in order to chart a sustainable development path and prevent further social disruption.” While I do believe humans across the globe are faced today with ever-mounting environmental pressures and adverse circumstances created by depletion and degradation, this simply underestimates human ingenuity just as much as the neo-Malthusians do.

Homer-Dixon, in his analysis, feels that humans cannot overcome conflict, which I feel is unrealistic. What would be the purpose of diplomats if human conflict was unable to be tackled? Scientists, economists, farmers, statisticians, and environmentalists need to work tirelessly to address these future concerns of population, consumption, and environmental stresses. Diplomats and politicians will need to address the mediation of conflicts created by scarcity, changing weather patterns, and other environmental shifts. Domestic and international cooperation can be used to overcome these challenges, albeit expecting some violent outburst in the process.

While the abovementioned issues are nowhere near mitigated, I believe that Homer-Dixon’s analysis has been proven false since the time of writing in 1991. Just as Malthus predicted doom much too soon, I do not believe that we are at the point of no-return regarding environmental conflict and its mitigation. Today more than ever, public and private institutions in the developing world are working to find solutions for agriculture that meet modern demands. High-level dialogue has become the norm for environmental conferences (with few concrete solutions, but still significant symbolically). Diplomats around the world seek solutions to environmental challenges with their counterparts every day.

Homer-Dixon presents his “ingenuity-gap” as a reason for the likelihood of future conflict. While yes, this gap can create grievances and lead to violence in the long run, more has been done to further information-sharing and capacity-building trainings in the last decade and a half since Homer-Dixon wrote his article (1999). In general, again, diplomats are the ones to promote this information sharing between countries. Mistakes made in western Africa can lead to suggestions on how to improve practices in Argentina, for example. Public institutions should be the leaders in trying to bridge this “ingenuity-gap” through widespread dissemination of research findings. In this way, the developing world is less likely to be left behind technologically, because these ideas should not cost them. In the past, research-sharing and development activities were conducted by private corporations for the benefit of their products, which would later return a profit for this investment. We are at a critical juncture now where this cannot be the only source of innovation in our world, and this is where social innovators come in as the saviors.

In conclusion, public funding for research must increase and be targeted toward mitigating Homer-Dixon’s key problems of population, consumption, and environmental stresses so that people globally can reap its benefits. This would be the best method to hopefully prevent Homer-Dixon’s pessimistic view of human failure by diminishing the “ingenuity-gap” in the face of these adversities.