I also heard that the French, British, Americans, Chinese, and well... pretty much all the nuclear club were using that area off Somalia as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. When the tsunami hit, the locals discovered this was happening when all the waste washed ashore. That, allegedly, helped spark the piracy. None of the western media outlets report this but the likes of Al Jazeera have been reporting it long before the piracy situation even started making mainstream headlines in the west. There has even been a UN special envoy tasked with investigating the situation.
EDIT: I knew an Al Jazeera link would go over here reallll well LOL, so here's an AFP link from Google about the UN investigation: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gVV_gQDsp1m8v7nPcumVc5Mc...