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> But I am trying to understand if the government is still largely to blame or not?

all blast fishing is a failure of governance so I'd say yes but the fishing cultures here in SEA are so different from anywhere else in the world so it's very hard to govern without strong central body. Lots of cultural, religious, poverty and spiritual stuff mixed into all of that which really complicates things.

IMO Thailand has a much stronger centralized government and just better geography to make enforcement easier. It's mostly mainland with coastlines while Indonesia is mostly islands which are notoriously difficult to govern. So to answer your question, it's probably just that incentives in Thailand go much further due to all of these variables.

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While it's hard to regulate fishing when your country is made up of endless islands, it's quite easy to regulate dynamite. So no, I don't think the number of islands is an excuse.

In Fiji, for example, no fisherman could get dynamite if they wanted it. The only way to get that is if you run a (very heavily regulated) mine, or a quarry, and you'd have to account for every blast.

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The fishermen don't use regular dynamite. They make their own with easily available agricultural and mining chemicals, which are impossible to ban on the island without other worse effects.
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Does it have to be dynamite or are other, improvised explosives possible?
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The article mentioned fertilizer - that’s not straightforward to control and precisely account for.
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Indonesia gets a free pass for an ongoing genocide, so it's not surprising nobody cares about them breaking coral.
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Care to explain for those of us unaware?
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The island of New Guinea is one of the most biodiverse places on earth. It hosts roughly 7% of all global species, with 60% of them being endemic. Peopled by Melanesians, it's one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth, with over 1000 languages.

The east of the island became independent (from Australia) in 1975 and is now Papua New Guinea. Meanwhile, the western half was handed over to Indonesian control following the end of Dutch rule, a status formalized through the controversial, UN-backed 1969 "Act of Free Choice" in which a tiny, handpicked group of local leaders voted under military duress to integrate with Indonesia.

Indonesia has been conducting a decades-long genocide of the people of West Papua. It gets little press because it's an ethnic cleansing slow-burn. Slaughter the Papuan people, replace them with Javanese, then bulldoze their forests to grow palm oil.

For more, read the abstract (or the entire paper) here: https://researchers.westernsydney.edu.au/en/publications/for...

There's a timeline of the history of the "conflict" here: https://www.papuapartners.org/west-papua

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-01/west-papuan-separatis...

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