Piracy Pays in Africa’s Gulf of Guinea
Pirates are kidnapping crews and holding them for ransom.
You don’t need a peg leg, eye patch, or parrot on your shoulder to be a modern-day pirate, but guns and high-speed boats are useful. Last year pirates hijacked three vessels, fired on 11, and boarded 161, according to a report this month by the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Center.
Maersk, the world’s biggest shipping company, is fed up. “It is unacceptable, in this day and age, that seafarers cannot perform their jobs of ensuring a vital supply chain for this region without having to worry about the risk of piracy,” said Aslak Ross, head of marine standards at Copenhagen-based A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S, told Bloomberg News. “The risk has reached a level where effective military capacity needs to be deployed.”