Asia piracy costs $25 bln a year, says expert

Asia piracy costs $25 bln a year, says expert

Jane Macartney Reuters Singapore

Piracy, mainly along Asia's busy sea lanes, is costing the world's economy US$25 billion a year and the threat is growing as modern buccaneers equip themselves with the latest technology, a regional expert said on Tuesday.

The warning from James Warren of the School of Asian Studies at Murdoch University in Australia follows a report from the London-based International Maritime Bureau (IMB) that showed a significant increase in pirate attacks on ocean shipping in the first nine months of this year.

"Southeast Asia is a global hot spot with more than half of all attacks worldwide in this region," Warren, on secondment to the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, said in a speech.

"The lack of law enforcement is pushing the new wave of violence to new heights," he said, comparing the pirates now armed with satellite dishes and doing business over the Internet with the forces of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.

The absence of policing and signs of official collusion in waters of Southeast Asia were merely sources of assistance to a violent trade that has expanded dramatically, spurred by the rapid opening and development of China's economy, Warren said.

"Space-age piracy is increasing," Warren said.

China was not only a market for many of the commodities -- timber or aviation fuel for example -- stolen from passing merchant ships but also a source of some of the organized crime behind the pirate attacks, he said.

Most vulnerable were spice routes of old that were prey to pirates in the late 18th century as well as the Gulf of Thailand, the Sulu sea near the Philippines, the triangle between Hong Kong, Manila and China's southern Hainan island and the narrow Straits of Malacca that divide Malaysia and Indonesia.

Piracy costs the world's economy about $25 billion a year, Warren said. Some ships just vanish.

The IMB's latest piracy report lists 271 incidents in the first nine months of this year compared with 253 a year earlier. Indonesia continues to report the highest number, with 72 attacks.

Before 1989, piracy in the strategic Malacca Straits that link shipping lanes between Europe and Asia was rare, about seven cases a year, but in 1989 the figure leapt to 28 and by 1991 the number of reported cases had soared to 50, Warren said.

The 600 ships sailing through the straits each day make choice prey for pirates, who track ship movements on the Internet and are armed with automatic weapons, said Warren.

"It is one of the most pirate-infested places in the world," he said, describing the fear among crews of finding themselves at the mercy of pirates.

The attackers are heavily armed, custom ordering weapons from a market saturated since the war in Vietnam and the U.S.-backed resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Another threat is environmental. The Malacca Straits saw the narrowest of escapes from a disaster potentially far greater than this month's oil spill off Spain or the Exxon Valdez in 1989.

In 1992, pirates boarded a supertanker and tied up the 24 crew, leaving the seven-story-high vessel the length of two football pitches to drift among the dangerous reefs and shoals.

But within minutes of the departure of the pirates, one crew member broke free and knew enough to slow down the ship, thus averting disaster, Warren said. The near calamity galvanized regional states, he said.

A recent crackdown by China had failed to halt piracy, instead prompting the robbers to sell their loot in India and Iran instead, shadowing the globalization of the world economy, he said.

The surge in piracy in the last three decades of the 20th century and into the 21st century, mirrored a phenomenon in the 18th century and both were triggered by the globalization of trade and movements of Western capital, he said.

Pirates roving through Southeast Asia in the late 18th century in state-of-the-art Viking-type boats rowed by slaves were put out of business by faster steam gunboats.

But today, pirates often have faster boats than the coast guard and are no less ruthless than their forebears.

"There are no easy answers," said Warren, stressing the need for law enforcement, cooperation among states and, crucially just as in the war on terror, the exchange of intelligence.