FACT: Pirate attacks are at their lowest in 30 years.

THE NUMBERS: Annual pirate attacks on shipping* – 

* Totals from International Maritime Bureau

WHAT THEY MEAN:

How many ships are on the water? UNCTAD’s Review of Maritime Transport 2023 counts precisely 105,395 large cargo ships, defined as vessels of 100 deadweight tons or more.  Other less exact sources find the world’s navies operating about 10,000 boats; wealthy individuals and tourists sailing around in about 10,800 cruise ships and pleasure yachts; and (per the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization) about 45,000 large factory-style fishing ships.  So, altogether about 170,000 large ships.

And how often do pirates attack these ships? Since 1992, the International Maritime Bureau, a consortium based in Kuala Lumpur, has been answering this question with quarterly reports based on notifications by shipowners. In 2022 IMB found 115 attacks, ranging from unarmed burglaries of ships in berth to gunpoint hijacks of ships on the high seas. This year they report 99 attacks from January through October 2023, which is about the same as the 97 attacks reported from Jan.-Oct. 2021, and a bit more than the 90 in Jan.-Oct. 2022. So pirate attacks have been pretty stable over the last three years at about two each week.  Some more context on this:

Piracy attack rates have fallen sharply: From 2000 to 2014, IMB was reporting between 300 and 500 pirate attacks per year.  The 115 attacks in 2022 were the lowest in its records, down nearly 75% from the 439 reported in 2012.  The largest reason for this drop is the near-elimination of attacks off the Horn of Africa, after the suppression of Somalia’s industrial-scale pirate fleet by an international naval consortium, Combined Task Force 151, between 2012 and 2015.  Attacks in Southeast Asia and West Africa, always more opportunistic and smaller scale than the Somali pirate industry, have also declined.

High-seas piracy accounts for about 40% of all pirate attacks: Somalia’s pirate industry involved large-scale organized attacks on high-seas shipping passing through the Bab-el-Mandeb strait (separating Yemen and Somalia) and the Gulf of Aden, aiming to take control of the targeted vessels, sell their cargoes, and hold their crews for ransom. This involved operations far offshore, in which pirate gangs used converted fishery vessels to carry fleets of speedboats for attacks on ships using automatic weapons. The typical current attack is much less ambitious, usually involving an opportunistic effort by a small group, often with knives rather than guns, to rob a ship at anchor or sailing close to shore. IMB’s count through October included 51 attacks on ships either anchored offshore or berthed at a dock, and 37 en route. Thirty of these 37 high-seas attacks took place in the Singapore Strait, and three involved actual hijackings – up from one hijacking each in 2021 and 2022m but still far below the 49 hijackings of 2012. A sample report from IMB two weeks ago describes a standard 2023 attack:

22.11.2023: 2135 UTC: Posn: 01:43.20N – 101:26.72E, Dumai Anchorage, Indonesia.
Four robbers armed with knives boarded an anchored tanker. They threatened and took hostage the duty AB while the OS managed to escape and inform the Duty Officer. Alarm raised and crew mustered. Seeing the crew alertness, the perpetrators escaped empty handed.

Pirate attacks are now most common in maritime Southeast Asia: Thirty-three of IMB’s 99 reported pirate attacks took place in the Singapore Strait, a 65-mile stretch of water which (per the Lowy Institute) handles about 1,000 ship transits daily.  Maritime Southeast Asia generally is the site of nearly half — 51 of 115 — of this year’s attacks.  (And Singapore-based RECAAP has a higher tally, of 98 attacks in Southeast Asia through the end of November.) Elsewhere, IMB reports 23 pirate attacks off Africa, 16 off South America, and none in the Mediterranean or North Atlantic.

Cargo ships are most frequently attacked: Most pirate attacks, by IMB’s count, target large ships carrying cargo, presumably as they are lightly defended — a very large container ship carrying 8,000 or more boxes may have only 20 crew members — and carry potentially valuable goods. The 99 attacks so far this year included 37 on tankers, 40 on bulk carriers, 14 on container ships, and 8 on all other kinds of shipping. IMB has no record of an attack over the last five years on a large fishing boat, a cruise ship or yachts, or a naval vessel.

Special note: PPI’s Trade and Global Markets staff will be on vacation next week, and the Trade Fact service will take the week off.  We wish friends and readers a happy holiday season, and will be back next year.

FURTHER READING

Data:

The International Maritime Bureau, noting the lowest piracy rate in a generation, is concerned about a rise in violent attacks this year.

Singapore-based Information Sharing Center for the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy (RECAAP) reports incidents and helps coordinate anti-piracy operations in Southeast Asia.

UNCTAD’s Review of Maritime Transport counts ships (in Chapter 2).

Policy:

Command Task Force 151, led this spring by Korea and now by the Philippines, patrols Somali waters.

And the U.S. Navy monitors the “Houthi” militia now threatening the Bab-el-Mandeb passage and Red Sea shipping from the Yemeni side.

NATO on counter-piracy missions.

And Sydney-based Lowy Institute looks at piracy in the Singapore Strait.

And some look-backs:

The Brookings Institution has background on the Somali pirate industry.

The standard dates and geography for the “Golden Age of Piracy” — Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, unlucky Captain Kidd, famous female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Reade, master of the game Henry Avery — are respectively (a) 1650-1720 and (b) much of the world. Kidd’s especially well-documented pirate voyage took him from Boston to London, then to Madagascar and the Indian Ocean littoral (where he unwisely targeted one of Emperor Aurangzeb’s ships), and back to the Caribbean before he got caught.  The Royal Maritime Museum in Greenwich has lots of good material.

For the big picture on pirate life, David Cordingly’s Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates.

And Robert Ritchie’s Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates zooms in on William Kidd, his murky connections with the Whig Party leadership in London and the Boston city government, and his allegedly lost treasure (don’t bother to look).

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

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FACT: The number of “chronically undernourished” people has grown by 163 million since 2017.

THE NUMBERS: Estimated count of “undernourished” world population –

* UN Food and Agricultural Organization.  

WHAT THEY MEAN:

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, marking its 180th anniversary next Tuesday, is more watched on TV than read. The TV versions hold up pretty well to the actual story — after the three Spirits show awful, avaricious Scrooge his past mistakes, his present isolation, and his lonely future grave, he reforms, recovers his own happiness, gives the Cratchits a raise, and so forth. But they do miss some of Dickens’ larger concern, which goes beyond Scrooge’s personal redemption to a more general critique of an affluent society’s indifference to the lives of its poor.  A relevant passage at the end, but first a current parallel in the large, recent, and rapid rise in worldwide “food insecurity”:

The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization defines “undernourishment” as follows:

“Undernourishment means that a person is not able to acquire enough food to meet the daily minimum dietary energy requirements, over a period of one year. FAO defines hunger as being synonymous with chronic undernourishment.”

FAO’s definition of “minimum dietary energy” varies by age, body size, etc. — an 18-year-old girl on average needs 2,500 calories daily and an 18-year-old boy 3,400 — but is about 2,410 calories across the population. By way of context, Americans get about 3,500 calories per day, and the world average is about 2,960. Alternatively, a standard hamburger delivers about 375 calories, a single chapati 70, a pupusa 300, and a serving of jollof rice 390.

The FAO has published annual estimates of the number of people living beneath this threshold since the late 1990s. Its first “Food Insecurity in the World” report, released in 1999 and covering the year 1996, reported 825 million chronically undernourished people. This was 14.9%, or one in seven, of a world population then estimated at 5.6 billion. Divided regionally, the total included 525 million Asians (177 million in East Asia, 284 million in South Asia, 64 million in Southeast Asia), 180 million in sub-Saharan Africa, 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 33 million in the Middle East and North Africa, and 34 million in “developed” countries.

Their estimates steadily shrank for nearly two decades. The 2005 report, by then optimistically retitled “State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World,” estimated a 12.1% undernourishment rate; the 2010 report found 8.6%; and the 2017 report 7.5%, or 572 million of 7.6 billion people. During this time, FAO’s estimate of undernourishment in East Asia fell to nearly zero, and that for Latin America and the Caribbean dropped to 38 million, South Asia’s to 167 million, and sub-Saharan Africa’s to 150 million.

Between 2010 and 2017, though, the picture of a general decline in hunger worldwide (if at different rates in different places) had grown equivocal. FAO’s estimates for undernourishment in Southeast Asia dropped by about half during these years. The estimates for Africa and the Middle East, though, began to rise. And since 2017, the two-generation retreat of hunger seems to have ended. By 2019, worldwide undernourishment had rebounded to 7.9% of the world’s population (613 million people).  Then, under the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (a large source of corn and wheat in developing countries), the estimate for 2021 came to 9.3% of world population and 739 million people, and the 2022 estimates are only modestly lower at 735 million and 9.2% of the world population. In sum, over the past six years, the count of undernourished people has grown by 163 million, including by 70 million in Africa and 90 million in South Asia.

Back now to Dickens. Most of the Carol’s “Christmas Present” chapter involves the Spirit showing Scrooge the happy parties and friendships he’s missing. Its last passage, though, reveals something that not only Scrooge, but the partiers too, have tried not to see:

From the foldings of its robe, the Spirit brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment. …

Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. 

Scrooge started back, appalled. “Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more. “They are Man’s,” said the Spirit. “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both.”

We wish our friends and readers a happy holiday season, grateful for our blessings and mindful of those who have less.

FURTHER READING

Worldwide:

FAO’s State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023, with archived earlier editions back to 1999.

Why the rise? The report views the COVID-19 pandemic as the largest cause of the recent rise in undernourishment, responsible for raising long-term hunger counts by over 100 million. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the second cause, responsible for another 23 million:

“It is projected that almost 600 million people will be chronically undernourished in 2030. This is about 119 million more than in a scenario in which neither the pandemic nor the war in Ukraine had occurred, and around 23 million more than if the war in Ukraine had not happened.”

USDA’s map of food and nutrition support programs.

At home:

A PPI report has ideas for improving the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP).

USDA’s Economic Research Service estimates about 5.1% of American households, including 12.6% of single-mom households, living with “very low food security” as of 2022.

And the spirit of the season:

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, 180 years later.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

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