FROM WIRED SHILLS

Arrr! Pirates Take Up to $12 Billion Worth of Booty

Don’t let the dilapidated fishing boats or the rusting AK-47s fool you. Pirates mean serious business. A maritime industry group crunched the numbers and found that the measures companies and governments take to avoid and combat the piracy threat cost between $7 billion and $12 billion every year.

The One Earth Future Foundation’s Oceans Beyond Piracy project documents exploding costs in piracy-related actions (.pdf). Ransoms paid to Somali pirates totaled $238 million in 2010 — the worst year for piracy on record, according to the International Chamber of Commerce.

The average payout to ransom a hijacked ship was $5.4 million last year, up from just $150,000 in 2005. (Wired magazine analyzed the Somali pirate business model in 2009.)

And ransoms aren’t even the lion’s share of piracy’s costs to global maritime commerce. Insuring ships passing near piracy-prone areas like the Gulf of Aden costs between $460 million and $3.2 billion. Naval presence to protect merchant shipping costs another $2 billion.

Regional economies lose up to $1.25 billion annually. Rerouting ships to less pirate-prone waters costs up to $3 billion. (Hat tip: GCaptain.)


Oceans Beyond Piracy readily admits that its estimate is imprecise. Piracy doesn’t have a clear impact on every economic measurement related to global maritime shipping. The overall economic downturn imposes its own costs on everything from insurance to local business impact.

What’s more, it’s “difficult to quantify the value of … world seaborne trade in monetary terms,” according to the International Maritime Association. But it’s undoubtedly massive: One figure the association provides shows that the operation of maritime ships — and there are 50,000 commercial vessels on the seas — produces $380 billion in freight rates, itself equivalent to 5 percent of global trade.

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FROM PROJECT CENSORED

The African land grab



In the midst of a severe food and economic crisis, the “land grabbing” trend has grown to an international phenomenon. The term refers to the purchase or lease of vast tracts of land by wealthier, food-insecure nations and private investors from mostly poor, developing countries in order to produce crops for export. Approximately 180 instances of such land transactions have been reported since mid-2008, as nations attempt to extend their control over food-producing lands and investors attempt to turn a profit in biofuels and soft commodities markets.



Why Africa? Because an estimated 90 percent of the world’s arable land is already in use, the search for more has led to the countries least touched by development, those in Africa. The accelerating land rush has been triggered by the worldwide food shortages that followed the sharp oil price rises in 2008, growing water shortages, and the European Union’s insistence that 10 percent of all transport fuel must come from plant-based biofuels by 2015. Devlin Kuyek, a Montreal-based researcher, said investing in Africa is now seen as a new food supply strategy by many governments. “Rich countries are eyeing Africa not just for a healthy return on capital, but also as an insurance policy. Food shortages and riots in twenty-eight countries in 2008, declining water supplies, climate change and huge population growth have together made land attractive. Africa has the most land and, compared with other continents, is cheap,” he said.



An Observer investigation estimates that up to 50 million hectares of land have been acquired in the last few years or is in the process of being negotiated by governments and wealthy investors working with state subsidies. For example, Ethiopia is one of the hungriest countries in the world, with more than 13 million people needing food aid, but paradoxically the government is offering at least three million hectares of its most fertile land to rich countries and some of the world’s most wealthy individuals to export food for their own populations.



The Africa-wide trend is being characterized by many as the new twenty-first-century colonization. Oromia in Ethiopia is one of the centers of the African land rush. Haile Hirpa, president of the Oromia Studies Association, said in a letter of protest to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that India had acquired one million hectares; Djibouti, 10,000 hectares; Saudi Arabia, 100,000 hectares; and that Egyptian, South Korean, Chinese, Nigerian, and other Arab investors were all active in the state. “The Saudis are enjoying the rice harvest, while the Oromos are dying from man-made famine as we speak,” he said.


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