Off the coast of Somalia, a sailor on board French ship the FS Sirocco observes two dhows through binoculars, establishing that they are bona fide fishing vessels.
If the coast of Somalia’s autonomous Puntland State is still home to pirates, they take to the seas a lot less frequently than they used to.
The presence of an international armada and the deterrents put in place by shipping companies have reduced piracy off the Somalian coast and in the Gulf of Aden to practically nothing, but the threat is still very present.
Photo: AFP
According to the European anti-piracy fleet Atalanta, the last capture of a major vessel by pirates dates back to May 2012. Since then, several vessels have been attacked or targeted, but the pirates have not managed to seize any of them.
They have been able to capture a handful of dhows — traditional sailing vessels — with the aim of using them as mother ships for launching attacks on other vessels, but the booty these yield pales in significance compared with that taken from the vessels seized when piracy was at its peak: Catches in those days included two supertankers, each carrying close to 2 million barrels of crude oil, and a Ukrainian cargo ship loaded with arms.
The Sirocco has not made any major catches either in its four months as Atalanta’s flagship, except for five pirates arrested in mid-January on board an Indian dhow they seized in a vain attempt to board a tanker.
Since then, the ships that make up the fleet have confined themselves to patrolling, keeping a watchful eye on the zone.
“The economic model of piracy has been broken,” said Etienne de Poncins, the head of EUCAP-Nestor, a EU mission that aims to beef up the security capacities of Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya, the Seychelles and Tanzania, and enable them to carry out surveillance of their own territorial waters.
When Somalian piracy was at its peak in 2011, the International Maritime Bureau counted 237 attacks attributed to pirates in the Indian Ocean, from the Somalian coast across the Sea of Oman.
Last year, the bureau recorded just five, all of which failed.
“At sea the phenomenon is under control, but the pirates are still there. They can be seen on the coast,” De Poncins said.
By arresting numerous pirates over the past few years, Atalanta and its allies — NATO, China and Japan, which have all deployed considerable means in the region, a shipping route key to world trade — have had a dissuasive effect.
A raft of measures taken by the shipping sector have also contributed to the decline of piracy: The presence of armed guards on board, the use of barbed wire, an increase in navigation speeds and navigating as far from the coast as possible.
Experts say pirates have never managed to seize a vessel protected by armed guards or sailing at a speed of more than 18 knots (33.3kph), but these measures are expensive, so much so that the World Bank said “piracy imposed a hidden tax on world trade.”
“Piracy costs the global economy roughly US$18 billion a year in increased trade costs — an amount that dwarfs the estimated US$53 million average annual ransom paid since 2005,” the bank said last year.
“It’s expensive, so the day when the shipping companies say: ‘That’s enough,’ the whole thing can kick off again quite quickly,” De Poncins said.
EU Naval Force officials say that given that attacks are becoming rare, ship owners and captains are starting to let their guard down, reporting that ships are again navigating at slower speeds and sailing closer to the coast to save fuel.
“We are becoming victims of our own success,” said Lieutenant Michael Quinn of Atalanta, adding that “the conditions on the Somali[an] coast have not changed and industry must not relax.”
The EU Naval Force’s mandate applies only to the sea; it is not authorized to launch land attacks on the pirates who still control large sections of the Somalian coast, notably in Puntland.
EUCAP-Nestor’s mission, which complements Atalanta’s, is therefore to “go ashore and train coast guards so that the countries of the region can be in a position to manage and control their maritime waters, but also to help them put legislation in place,” De Poncins said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained