Pirate attacks on shipping have fallen to their lowest level for 21 years, as crackdowns against maritime crime off the coasts of east Africa and Southeast Asia have proved successful.
The sharp decline in piracy — this year is on course to be the first since 2005 not to see a single person killed by pirates — may help calm fears that the world is becoming a more dangerous place, amid war in Syria and an upsurge in terrorist attacks.
However, there has been a rise in attacks off the coast of Nigeria, with pirates increasingly looking to kidnap crew members and hold them to ransom.
Globally, there were 98 actual or attempted pirate attacks in the first half of 2016, according to the International Chamber of Commerce’s International Maritime Bureau, the lowest tally since 1995 and a marked fall on the 134 recorded in the same period last year and the peak of 266 in the first six months of 2011, as the first chart shows.
“This drop in world piracy is encouraging news. Two main factors are recent improvements around Indonesia and the continued deterrence of Somali pirates off east Africa,” said Pottengal Mukundan, director of the IMB.
The fall in pirate activity is not just good news in human terms, but in financial ones as well. The One Earth Foundation, a Colorado-based governance foundation, estimated that in 2011, at the height of the Somali pirate epidemic, the cost to the maritime industry ran to $3.2bn a year in extra insurance costs and $2.95bn in rerouting ships around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. It put piracy’s total annual cost to the world economy at $7bn-$12bn.
As a result of increased naval patrols in the waters off east Africa, shipowners’ greater willingness to employ armed guards and efforts to make vessels harder to board, Somali pirates failed to carry out a single attack last year, the first time they have drawn a blank since at least 2006, the IMB said.
So far this year the waters off Somalia have again been incident free, although one attempted boarding of a container vessel in the Gulf of Aden in May was attributed to Somalis.
Despite this, Mr Mukundan says it is too early to claim success against the Somali pirates, given that the political situation in their homeland remains “fragile”, allowing organised crime to flourish.
The more recent spike in attacks on shipping in Southeast Asia also appears to be abating, as indicated in the second chart. Last year 108 incidents were reported in Indonesian waters, the highest figure for more than a decade.
However actual and reported attacks fell to 24 in the first half of 2016, down from 54 in the same period last year and the lowest figure since 2011. Malaysian waters also became safer while there were no recorded incidents in the Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia, a channel plagued by piracy for centuries, or the Singapore Straits.
Mr Mukundan said thefts from ships in the region had been a “big problem” between April 2014 and Aug 2015, but that the authorities were now getting on top of the problem.
“A couple of these gangs have been caught and put on trial and sentenced to very long terms in prison in Malaysia,” he said, while a suspected criminal “mastermind” had been arrested in Indonesia.
Piracy remains endemic in the Sulu Sea, between the Philippines and Borneo, however. The sea is used by fishing vessels and tugs pulling barges carrying up to 5,000 tonnes of coal or palm oil, which are “sitting targets” for faster pirate ships, Mr Mukundan said.
“The crew are kidnapped and taken to the Philippines where in some cases they have been sold on to terrorist groups” and held for ransom, he added. As a result “the Malaysian government has banned barge transportation through the Sulu Sea”.
The most serious problems are now off the west coast of Africa, where Nigerian gangs have adopted “a new trend which is quite disturbing”, said Mr Mukundan.
In the past, these pirates have been content to board ships and steal their cargo, such as oil from tankers. However this activity has reduced, with Mr Mukundan speculating that the slide in oil prices has made such crime less attractive.
Instead, the gangs now tend to board vessels such as bulk carriers up to 120 nautical miles offshore, kidnap some of the crew and take them ashore to be held for ransom. Nigerian pirates kidnapped 24 crew members in the first half of this year, up from just 10 in the first six months of 2015.
These incidents are “increasingly violent”, with Nigerians accounting for eight of the nine incidents worldwide in which ships were fired on in the January-June period.
Despite the fact that paying a ransom is likely to encourage further kidnappings, Mr Mukundan said they were always paid.
“It’s very difficult to imagine a shipowner who is prepared to ignore the plight of his kidnapped crew members. It would be very unlikely to happen. You can’t abandon them,” he said.
Given that Nigerian pirates have been reported as far south as Angola and as far north as Sierra Leone, Mr Mukundan said greater international co-operation was needed to tackle the problem, with countries being more willing to share information to help secure prosecutions.
The IMB also called for agreements to allow a naval vessel that is in hot pursuit of suspects to be allowed to travel into the territorial waters of a neighbouring state, rather than being forced to give up the chase.
“There are a lot of countries with very short coastlines so it’s easy to escape from one territorial water to another,” Mr Mukundan said. “Agreements are required, but that requires a lot of confidence-building among countries that that right won’t be used for other purposes.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/3/be107aba-6a13-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c.html#axzz4IPgMJets
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