When Pirates Attack: The Cost of Doing Business On the Open Sea

[Better Believe It]

When Pirates Attack: The Cost of Doing Business On the Open Sea
By Richard Pollak
The Nation
April 22, 2009

The Navy's daring rescue of Richard Phillips, kidnapped captain of the Maersk Alabama, drew such media trumpeting and general cheering around the globe that readers and viewers may be excused for thinking modern-day piracy is something new. Actually, all that's new is the boldness of the well-armed Somali corsairs and, in the case of Phillips's 17,000-ton container ship, the fact that the flag and the captain were American. Until now, piracy has never been a big story here or abroad because most ship owners, as well as their cargo clients and insurance companies, have played it down, willingly paying multimillion-dollar ransoms for the return of hijacked vessels and placing their crews in harm's way because the financial cost of piracy is far less than that of protecting the ships.

The human victims have long been expendable. Thousands of crew members, usually poor and nonwhite, serve on container ships, tankers and bulk carriers for as long as a year at a time, with almost no time off. When pirates manage to clamber aboard, these underpaid, perpetually exhausted men are always terrorized, frequently injured and sometimes set adrift in lifeboats or murdered outright on deck and dumped into the sea.

After the Maersk Alabama incident, an executive of the Danish conglomerate said, "Our main concern is always the safety and security of our crews." But for years Maersk and most other shipping firms, large and small, have refused to spend the money it would take to make each vessel more secure. Few, for example, have invested in Secure-Ship, an electrified wire fence that delivers a 9,000-volt nonlethal shock to anyone attempting to climb aboard.

There are other tactics merchant ships could employ to reduce piracy, from placing private armed teams aboard during passage through dangerous waters to avoiding those waters altogether. These and other safety strategies would doubtless cost a lot of money, but until the shipping community abandons its pinch-penny cynicism, piracy off the coast of Somalia is certain to grow and to encourage brigands elsewhere.

Please read the complete article at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090511/pollak?rel=hp_currently

[louis-t]

1. Very short-sighted on the part of the owners.

Pirates are buying larger ships, more guns with the loot. It will soon be impossible to stop them.

[izquierdista]

2. Crew members

You mean the grunts swabbing the decks are the least of management's concerns? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!

[moondust]

3. I'd guess that barbed wire is

considerably more affordable than aircraft carriers and helicopter gunships patrolling most of the Indian Ocean.

Perhaps those expensive taxpayer-funded protections are just what the shipping companies are waiting for.