Pirates and Pigs - The Nightmare By Sandy Krolick Ph.D.

Who would have 'thunk' before he took office, that at the top of Obama's to do list would be fighting pirates and pigs. Well that is the case. Not one hundred days into his fairytale presidency, Barack Obama is dealing with two issues that were not even on the radar screen last fall. But why are pirates and pigs so important, and how did the issues they present, holding sailors and the world's populations hostage, come to occupy center stage in our efficiently run, and digitally globalized economy? The answers may be simpler and more frightening then we first suspect.

It has been a long time since Captain Hook once sailed the waters off the coast of Neverland. And, the Pirates of the Caribbean: why that was just a movie that kept repeating itself. But those young boys in speedboats taking sailors and ships hostage off the coast of Somalia...that is real. And it all began two decades ago as young Somali fishermen no longer had safe and plentiful waters in which to fish for their villages' own survival. Their livelihood had been destroyed. How, you might ask? By the illegal and often clandestine encroachment by fishing fleets from more 'developed' nations like South Korea, Japan and Spain, among others. The pillaging of the Somali coastline began shortly after the dismantling of Somalia's last government in the early 90's. A 2006 United Nations report noted that,

"In the absence of the country's at one time serviceable coastguard, Somali waters have become the site of an international 'free for all,' with fishing fleets from around the world illegally plundering Somali stocks and freezing out the country's own rudimentarily-equipped fishermen."

And according to another U.N. report, approximately $300 million worth of seafood is stolen from the Somali coastal waters each year. It appears that initially it was these young fishermen who turned to piracy in order to protect their own waters against larger, and more sophisticated trespassers, whose equipment, technology and firepower outpaced the ability of small local Somali fishermen. In addition, several European nations found that it was "more cost effective" to use these same waters as a toxic waste dump for years. And now the bills are becoming due. We more 'developed' nations of the world have created, it seems, the conditions leading to the piracy we are now desperately fighting to control. Our policies and practices, driven by motives of profit and economic expansion, have led to this current crisis.

And now to the pigs! Despite how much we might try, this too is not traceable back to the small farms and underdeveloped village areas of the world, like those in rural Mexico, Thailand or China. No, it is a direct result of large-scale domestication, live stocking and agribusiness farming that has created our current crisis. Again, it is the developed nations and their corporations that have created the dilemma. While in the earlier part of the 20th century most pig farming was conducted by small farmers in backyards and small family plots, agribusiness eventually bought up the smaller players (who could no longer afford to compete) and harvested these farms into large colonies or 'pig cities' of tens of thousands of pigs, with a commensurate increase in the potential for squalor, waste and disease.

Moreover, the IMF and World Bank further complicated the problem by requiring smaller 'developing' countries to open their economies to outside corporations if they wanted IMF loans. So agribusiness moved in and, without the same oversight and regulation, closed down the smaller indigenous players, and created "cities of pigs that stretch around the world," hotbeds of disease. And it is big American-based agribusinesses like Holly Farms, Tyson and Perdue, holding large pig (and poultry: remember the bird flu) farms that are at the center of the latest flu pandemic scare.

Now, what is the common denominator among these pigs and pirates? And why am I forced to view these twin challenges together, as the result of a common cause? Could it have to do with the tendency of modern industrial society towards economic and political expansionism, operating with a competitive, zero sum-game rationale? Could it have to do with the fact that such 'civilized' games necessarily create winners and losers? Perhaps there is just something about the values underlying our civilized societies, with our commitment to hierarchy, divisiveness, and control, that mechanically negates those who are different, the strangers, and systemically creates victors and victims, masters and slaves. When will the developed world of 'civilized' nations realize that they have been living in a dream, imagining their own omnipotence, and that now the dream is ending and we must admit finally that we have given birth to a nightmare? But, perhaps the nightmare is only just begun!

After a ten-year career in academia, Dr. Krolick spent the next twenty years in the executive ranks of several of America's largest international firms. Sandy has spent many years traveling around the world, including parts of Asia, Africa, Western and Eastern Europe. Retiring from business at fifty, he recently returned to the USA with his wife Anna, after teaching for several years in the central Siberian Steppe, at the foot of the Altai mountains in Barnaul, Russia. His latest book, The Recovery of Ecstasy: Notebooks from Siberia, is available at http://www.amazon.com/Recovery-Ecstasy-Notebooks-Siberia/dp/1439227365/?tag=widgetsamazon-20 or visit him @ http://www.kulturcritic.com