Two wrongs don't make a right Bob.
Mr. Hari's story has a lot of holes in it. Look to West Africa for dumping scandals, no sensible Mafia man is going to waste fuel sending stuff to be dumped off Somalia, when he can just pop out of the Medi and down the coast a bit.
Yes there is a problem with fisheries protection, but again its more where the big shoals of fish are. Also were you aware the EU is the biggest provider of fisheries protection aid to Africa as a whole?
Believe me from personal experience these pirates off Somali are terrorists with a capital "T".

Bill, I don't think I was saying the pirates were 'right'. In fact I doubt you could carry out that sort of work without a great deal of unpleasant behaviour, to put it mildly. I think what Johann was pointing out was that as with so many of these apparent black and white issues there is usually a lot of murky grey stuff that never gets to the surface.

I think Johnan is wrong. Somalia is run by warlords. I doubt any old poverty stricken Somalian could just randomly get a ocean worthy boat, and machine guns and go around attacking people. How would they find the ocean liners in the first place. It is all like organised crime, with the elites of somalia involved in it, probably with some western mafia groups. If we tolerate the pirates it like tolerating the mafia in southern italy to help stop poverty in italy. I would not be surpised if there was some intelligence agency helping the pirates for some geopolitical reasons anyway maybe to keeep oil prices up or to put pressure on certain nations oil exports, or just to steal money.
Should we support the taliban drug dealers as just standing up for their people.

Bob, you would not believe how murky the grey stuff is out there off Somali.
Dirty Euro - hot, hot, very hot!
Its rumoured some of the big ju-ju boys from the Straits of Malacca are now down there, because things were starting to heat up for them there.
I think Mr. Hari is trying to fit the pirates into this to make it a more "current" topic.
Far better if he left the pirates out, and concentrated on producing two stories, one on the toxic waste dumping off the whole African coast, and the other on the raping of the African fish stocks.
Even we in the UK are not exempt from being involved in that, there are Scottish boats working out of Namibia!

Braindead Bob and Braindead Johann having a stupidity competition.

I go 5/6 the pair.

Still, I'm sure the Somali criminals will be distributing their three million among the local populace rather than depositing it in a Swiss bank account.

At least Braindead Johann gets paid to be so stupid.

What's your excuse?