4PM Seaweed and terrorism.

This fascinating article explains why seaweed may be of vital strategic interest to the war on terror. In the Philippines, lack of financial opportunity has made some areas ripe recruiting grounds for local militant factions, but this has been remedied in recent decades by the emergence of seaweed harvesting, a profitable enough endeavor to make young men think they have a real future in non-violence. But with competition from China and Indonesia, lack of money due to the global credit crunch, and failure of the government to continue support funds, the decline in the Philippines’s seaweed market threatens to reopen those areas to more effective terrorist recruitment.