[greenbean36191]

There is no way in situ farms can control costs to compete with people trading and selling locally grown frags. Shipping costs are a huge chunk of the price and they're controlled by the airline, not the growers. Even if the farmers could produce corals for free, shipping would still make them more expensive than most locally produced frags. It comes down to whether hobbyists really want to do something to "preserve the coral reefs of the world" or if they're unwilling to pay that premium because it's all about money for them.

Tourism is certainly another option to give value to the reefs, but it's not easy and doesn't have a great environmental record itself. It's certainly possible to have a thriving tourist industry in some of these places, and Fiji is a good example, but it takes a lot of investment to establish that. In most of the collection areas, the tourism infrastructure isn't there. There aren't a lot of restaurants or hotels, the airports are small and don't support large airliners or large numbers of planes, etc. Changing that requires a huge monetary investment (which most of these places don't have) and lots of construction material, which usually mean coral rock for aggregate and cement. There are also the logistical issues that are out of the hands of these places. Look at the Marshall Islands. It takes a full day, sometimes 2, to get there from LA and will cost you close to $3000. There's nothing they can do to change that. Once you get there, you can see all of the main island in a day. When you're ready to leave, flights out are so infrequent and canceled so regularly that it can often take 3-4 days, sometimes a week, to get out. That won't work for most tourists. Now how do they compete with places like Fiji for tourist dollars?

Tourism can also do a considerable amount of damage to the reefs. Israel's reefs are an excellent example of that. Divers and snorkelers have destroyed many of the most popular sites to the point that the government has been forced to close some of them completely and limit the access to other sites. Almost everywhere diving tourism is popular has similar problems, they just don't have hard numbers on how bad things are and/or the government doesn't have the interest or resources to fix it.

Tourism is a good option if it's properly regulated, but it's not a viable option everywhere collection is occurring. However, the logistics and infrastructure (with a little modification) for farming are already in place where collection is occurring now. It's mostly just a matter of getting approval to do it, training the locals, and making it profitable.