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.

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Poacher5 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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paimapi 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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mushi_shi 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	zmgsabst 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They feel superior to those “lesser” humans, when denying them equal intelligence, agency, and morality. They’re just getting off on being racist to the “savages who don’t know better”.

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joshuaissac 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

	▲	parineum 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	paimapi 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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