For the pirates of Somalia buccaneering is a business, one that United Nations investigators called “the most lucrative economic activity” in the country.

Hostages are valuable and often well treated until a ransom is paid and they are handed over. As negotiations rumble on they spend weeks or months kept in safe houses in busy seaside towns, eating pasta and camel meat.

Although Islamist groups such as al-Shabaab operate with a large degree of freedom in Somalia and are eager to capture Westerners there have been no cases of hostages handed from pirates to extremists.

Somalia’s piracy grew out of coastal fishing communities. Fishermen say that they watched for years as foreign trawlers plundered the rich waters and foreign ships dumped toxic waste. “I believe the title of pirates should be given to those who come to our waters illegally,” one incarcerated pirate told The Times this year.

Early attacks were aimed at exacting an informal tax from the trawlers but kidnapping proved more lucrative. Onshore financiers now commonly put up the money for boats, engines, guns, ladders, satellite phones and handheld global positioning systems. The pirates set sail and ransoms are split between crews and backers.

About 20,000 ships a year sail past the Somali coast en route to and from the busy Suez Canal through a channel only 200 miles across at its widest point. It is easy pickings for pirates based in surrounding towns that have been transformed by ransom money into havens, with beachside villas replacing shacks and successful pirates celebrate by taking new wives in lavish wedding ceremonies.

Somalia has become synonymous with piracy in recent years, but it has long been a byword for chaos. The military dictator General Mohamed Siad Barre ruled with violence and stoked clan tensions for two decades until he was chased out of the capital Mogadishu in 1991 by an alliance of warlords.

There has been no functioning national government since, despite repeated attempts by the international community to fashion one and impose it on the fractious country. A generation has grown up knowing nothing but violence and the truth that with a gun you might just survive.

A UN-backed government sits in Mogadishu but controls only pockets of the capital “with the support of African Union peacekeepers" but it comes under almost daily mortar attack and provides none of the services expected of a working government.

Without order on land it is difficult to impose order at sea. As pirate gangs extend their range, the warships are finding that patrolling more than a million square miles to protect thousands of vessels from armed speedboats is an impossible task.

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