No one is making excuses for breaking laws or trying to claim you have any responsibility to keep foreigners employed.
I am doing something to help rebuild reefs. I educate people on aquaculture, reef farming. Others in this hobby also do such as Garf. This hobby is paying for rebuilding the reefs when we buy from farmers instead of divers and exporters.
Trading frags grown over here and educating people about farming does absolutely nothing to rebuild the reef and almost nothing to slow their destruction. This argument completely ignores the political and economic situation.
The US, Australia, and Israel are all developed countries with economic opportunities, the resources to enforce their environmental laws, and the majority of their populations aren't dependent on the reefs for their livelihood. Comparing them to the areas in the Indo-pacific and Caribbean where collection is occurring is apples to oranges. These are primarily third world countries. The federal governments are poor and don't have the resources to enforce the current environmental laws, much less new ones. The fact that most of these areas are tribally controlled and almost everyone depends on the reef for their livelihood makes that almost impossible too.
The best basement farmers can hope to do is reduce or eliminate our demand for wild corals. What good does that do for the reefs though? Stopping the hobby's demand for corals doesn't eliminate the demand for goods from the reef. These people have to make a living one way or another and the reef is their main resource. That's where they get their food and it's how they get their money. We're hardly the only group willing to pay them for what they can extract. There is demand for shells and coral for the jewelry, curio, and clothing industries. The construction and cement industry will pay them for coral, liverock, shells, and sand. The food and supplement industry will pay them for coral, rock, sand, algae, fish, and inverts. Most of these industries pay less (so more has to be extracted) and they use less selective methods. Eliminating the demand for the hobby does very little to reduce demand for products from the reef. All it does is shift it to these other industries. If you lost your job you wouldn't just give up and live without an income. Neither do these people. It just happens that going down to the McDonald's and applying isn't an option for them. The reef is their source of income whether it's through us or someone else.
You can try to ban everyone else from paying them too, but that ban is only as good as the ability to enforce it. When there's one officer per 1000 miles and he doesn't have a boat and hasn't been paid in a month (which is a pretty common occurrence), the laws are pretty meaningless.
As hobbyists we can either encourage the collectors to practice sustainable levels of wild collection (not likely to happen) or we can promote other economic alternatives for them to help get them out of the consumptive use business. Promoting
in situ farming accomplishes that goal while still providing us with corals, if they're slightly more expensive. Growing them at home undermines the attempts to establish
in situ aquaculture. If you would rather spend $10 for a frag grown in Bubba's basement, than $40 for one grown in Indonesia, what incentive do the Indonesians have to farm rather than just harvest?
Whether or not the foreigners are employed and by whom is directly tied to their impact on the reef. Hobbyists can either put their money where their mouth is and pay a premium to have a real effect or they can keep patting themselves on the backs and feeling good while they bury their heads in the sand.
