Ridding intra-Asian trade lanes of pirates is now No 1 maritime security job
 AS the large, but still fragile, intra-Asia trade continues to grow, it is becoming clear that more - much more - must be done to deal with the major threat to its future posed by rising levels of piracy.
While never a thing of the past, piracy in the South China Sea, the Sulu Sea, the Celebes Sea, and the Straits of Malacca, has now become the No 1 world hotspot now that the problem off the Horn of Africa has receded. Half of the world's pirate attacks now take place in the waters off Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia.
In south east Asia there have been 125 pirate attacks reported in the region in a year, triple the number from 2009. Over the same period, attacks off the Horn of Africa shrank from 197 to 13.
While Nigerian piracy, which has been on the rise in recent years, had been partly driven by political motivations of a local nature, politically motivated kidnapping by pirates are a new phenomenon.
Muslim terrorists from the groups such as Abu Sayyaf Faction are targeting smaller vessels though there has been an attack on a large Korean vessel.
In response to a string of hijackings by Islamist pirates in the southern Philippines targeting commercial vessels, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines have designated a safer transit corridor for ships crossing dangerous waters.
Last year nearly 20 Indonesian and Malaysian crew were kidnapped by the Abu Sayyaf guerrillas. Alarmed at the frequency of attacks, port authorities in some parts of Indonesia, particularly Kalimantan, that is Indonesian Borneo, have stopped issuing permits to ships taking coal to the southern Philippines, reported Reuters.
"The ministers have agreed in principle to explore the following measures, including a transit corridor within the maritime areas of common concern, which will serve as designated sea lanes for mariners," the defence ministers of the three nations said in a joint statement after a meeting in Manila.
But a larger problem lies to the west in waters closer to Singapore. Unlike Somali pirates, who are largely out of business, because of intense naval patrols, south east Asian pirates until recenly did not take hostages. Their business was stealing cargoes of fuel from small low and slow product tankers.
The pirates themselves tend to be locals from seaside villages like the Somali crews. But they differ in that they are part of expert criminal networks that gather intelligence, coordinate attacks, work in separate gangs. They even have their own tankers that come alongside the pirated vessel and siphon off petrol, later to liaise with big-time buyers, who buy the hot fuel at deep discounts.
The boom in south Asian piracy makes business sense, says a lengthy CNBC study of the problem. Some 130,000 vessels pass by Singapore each year which breaks down to a ship entering the strait every four minutes. And the global trade that flows through that bottleneck - only 1.7 miles wide at its narrowest point - is growing.
The costs of piracy extend far beyond the actual vessels that are attacked. The US Merchant Marine estimates that global piracy costs shippers US$4.9 billion to $8.3 billion a year.
Those higher costs come in the form of lost cargo, higher insurance, added shipping times, extra compensation to crews, litigation and legal fees. Even cruising faster in an effort to discourage pirates adds costs. Jon Helmick, a captain with the United States Merchant Marine Academy, overseen by the Maritime Administration at the Department of Transportation, said that cruising at 17.9 knots in a supertanker - to reduce the chances of an attack - versus the typical 12.8 knots, adds an extra $88,000 in fuel expense per ship per day.
Costs are passed on to consumers in the increasingly interconnected global markets, where losses in one part of the world affect costs in another. And while it's impossible to quantify exactly how much more consumer pay for regular goods as a result of piracy and higher shipping costs, it's worth considering that more than 90 per cent of the world's trade is carried by sea.
The typical pirate attack takes place at night, The small 5,000-ton product tanker Ai Maru was steaming alone when a speedboat slipped in from the darkness and overtook her about 30 miles off Malaysia.
Moments later, seven men with handguns and knives clambered up over the side, overcame crewmen at gunpoint and destroyed the ship's communications equipment.
The attackers stripped the 13-man crew of their personal belongings, locked them in a room and spent the next hours getting to the real work at hand: stealing the cargo. A second tanker, manned by criminal confederates came alongside and siphoned off 620 tonnes of high grade marine gas oil to their own ships.
The pirates were long gone by the time naval and coast guard help arrived, and with them their haul worth US$550,000, according to the Singapore-based International Chamber of Commerce's International Maritime Bureau (IMB).
Bridge teams with guns to their heads will not sound the alarm even if a patrol boat passes nearby. Nor will the sight of two vessels tied together arouse suspicion as such ship-to-ship bunkering operations are common and legitimate.
After the illicit cargo transfer is done, pirates steal crew members' phones. And even if the seafaring thieves are on a big vessel, they can blend in with the hundreds of others in the area before the authorities arrive.
Former ship's master David Watkins tells a story of being awakened by a crewmate in the middle of the night who said that nine pirates wielding ropes, grappling hooks and machetes were swarming up over the stern of his crude carrier as it sailed through the strait close enough to see the nighttime lights of Singapore.
Armed with crowbars, his 19-man crew mustered on deck and readied for a hand-to-hand fight. "Nobody went to sleep that night," he said. "No one wants to get into the conflict, I have to admit. Sometimes there's this bravado about attacking pirates. But when push comes to shove, all you want to do is constrain them or subdue them."
Two pirates drowned that night as they tried to escape from the superior numbers of the crew.
Pirates in the Strait of Malacca and Singapore Strait prefer small cargo ships carrying scrap metal, and small tankers transporting liquid fuel or other petroleum products. Those cargoes are difficult to trace on the black market, experts said.
Nine tankers in the straits and east of Singapore in the South China Sea had their liquid cargoes siphoned off between April and August, according to the IMB.
A big problem is the number of governments and other groups fighting piracy. Said BIMCO security chief Giles Noakes: "It's like herding cats." The region has three major national jurisdictions - Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. The geography of the region makes intercepting and tracking down pirates extra difficult. Malaysia is broken into two main parts, one on a peninsula north of Singapore, and the other on the island of Borneo it shares with Indonesia, which is due south of Singapore. And then Indonesia is a vast archipelago in its own right, with 17,000 islands that provide endless villages, grottoes, inlets and other nooks where pirates hide out.
While it is a big problem, solving seems the best way forward. It was the same with pirates off the Horn of Africa, as it remains a serious problem sorting policy and personnel differences among the many governments of West Africa. But eventually, through trial and error, they got it right in East Africa and the India Ocean, and Somalian piracy is not nearly the problem was only a few years ago.
It is clear that much the same has to be done to rectify a problem which is now threatening the growth of the world's largest shipping market. There is less money involved, but so many more lives depend on this trade's future that it will pay to rid the world of the scourge of Asia piracy as soon as possible.
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