High-seas pirate attacks –
| 2022: | 120? |
| 2012: | 197 |
| 2002: | 383 |
| 2000: | 471 |
WHAT THEY MEAN:
From the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Centre, a three-party encounter two weeks ago a few miles off Cote d’Ivoire, with an unarmed South Korean oil tanker, a gang of pirates, and the Italian naval frigate Comandante Borsini:
“Owners [of an oil tanker] reported that they had lost communication. The International Maritime Bureau Piracy Reporting Centre broadcast a missing vessel message to all ships in the region to look out for the missing tanker. On November 25, 2022, the Master [i.e. captain of the tanker] contacted the owners and reported that eight armed pirates had boarded the vessel and destroyed all navigation and communication systems. The crew managed to retreat into the citadel. [A secure compartment of the ship, heavily armored.] An Italian navy warship later intercepted and rendered assistance to the vessel until a tow was arranged. All crew reported safe.”
And another one, a week ago Saturday, near Singapore:
“Six robbers armed with knives boarded a bulk carrier underway and entered the engine room. The robbers were spotted by the duty watchman, who immediately informed the bridge. Alarm raised and crew mustered. Seeing the crew alertness, the robbers escaped empty handed. Singapore Coast Guard boarded the vessel to investigate.”
The IMB has tracked pirate attacks like these since the early 1990s. Its 2021 report tallied 132 attacks and attempts, fewer than in any year since 1994. The 2022 figures are down again, to 90 over the year’s first nine months, suggesting a full-year total of about 120. The two events above are typical of the current reports: small groups of pirates, poorly armed in the Singapore Strait event, and quick responses by local or international naval patrols. A quick history and explanation of this unheralded success story:
The early 21st-century pirate boom began with the collapse of the Somali state in the 1990s. The aftermath of this event brought sequential waves of violent gangs, Islamic fundamentalist militias, international interventions, and more violent gangs, culminating in the creation of a large-scale organized pirate industry with little if any modern precedent. Absent a central authority capable of imposing laws, pirates converted a set of fishing trawlers into a kind of pirate fleet, each able to carry a handful of small speed boats from the coast into the nearby shipping lanes.
These are quite busy: the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the 16-mile-wide ‘Bab-el-Mandeb’ strait separating Somalia from Yemen are the principal commercial and energy link between Asia and Europe, with 50 ship transits and 3.4 million barrels of oil daily. And a big commercial tanker or bulk carrier is not a floating fortress — the typically unarmed crews numbered about 20 — and piracy became for a while lucrative. The speedboats, each carrying a small crew armed with automatic weapons and sometimes grenade launchers, would then attempt to board and capture a targeted commercial ship. At their peak in 2011, pirates captured 49 ships and held over 1,100 crew members for ransoms averaging $5 million. Economists at the time guessed at a global-economy damage figure of about $12 billion per year.
A decade later, international naval patrols have essentially eliminated the threat off Somalia, and greatly reduced the global incidence of piracy. The 29-country Red Sea naval patrol known as CTF-151 (“Combined Task Force 151”) began protecting ships in transit in 2009; the last two successful attacks on vessels off Somalia, both in 2017, are now five years in the past. Smaller similar patrols drawing on this experience, like the Comandante Borsini’s interception of the pirate group off Cote d’Ivoire last month, have also sharply cut back the less organized piracy industries in the Gulf of Guinea. (Though in that case, the pirates succeeded at least in holding up the crew for money.) The most frequent area for pirate attacks is now maritime Southeast Asia, the site of 48 of the 90 events reported in IMB’s 2022 tally.
Some lowlights from the International Maritime Bureau’s report on pirate attacks this year:
Places: 31 attacks in the Singapore Strait, 17 elsewhere in Malaysia and Indonesia, 12 in the Gulf of Guinea, 10 in the Caribbean, 8 off Peru, and 8 in the Bay of Bengal, and one apiece off South Africa, Liberia, Congo, and Angola.
Nature: 37 attacks against high-seas shipping, with one successful hijacking (also off Cote d’Ivoire) and four failed attempts, along with 48 attacks on ships in port, for a total of 85 boardings.
The International Maritime Bureau, noting the lowest piracy rate in a generation, hopes shipping companies and governments keep up the pressure.
Maritime Southeast Asia is this year’s highest-piracy region. The Singapore-based Information Sharing Center for the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy (RECAAP) reports incidents and oversees anti-piracy operations.
Naval links:
Command Task Force 151, led last year by Pakistan and this year by Brazil, patrols Somali waters.
The Comandante Borsini rescues the tanker.
… and Italy’s Marine Militare.
And NATO on counter-piracy missions
Then:
Brookings Institution background on the origins of the Somali pirate industry.
A 2010 Transportation Department report reviews pirate threats to shipping and economies.
The U.S. Navy explains its (in retrospect, successful) plan.
And “Eye for Transport” estimates annual piracy costs for the world economy at $12 billion a decade ago, summing up ransom payments, higher insurance costs, the $2 billion in naval patrol budgets, and higher shipping costs as some companies route around Africa rather than risking the Bab el Mandeb transit, with Egypt losing most ($642 million) via falling Suez Canal revenues.
And a long look back:
The standard dates for the “Golden Age of Piracy” – Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, the unlucky Captain Kidd, the famous female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Reade, master of the game Henry Avery – are 1650-1720 and spanned much of the world. Kidd’s very well-documented pirate voyage took him from Boston to London, then Madagascar and the Indian Ocean (where he unwisely targeted one of Emperor Aurangzeb’s ships), to the Caribbean. 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 for a close-in, Robert Ritchie’s Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates zooms in on the life of William Kidd, with Indian Ocean and Caribbean misadventures, murky political associations in the Whig Party, and allegedly lost treasure.
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 Progressive Economy 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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