By John Acher
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Members of the Danish Shipowners Association agreed on Thursday that the piracy problem is getting worse and shippers need to resort to a wide range of measures against pirates and "activate the full toolbox," the association's spokesman said.
Piracy is rife particularly off the Horn of Africa, disrupting crucial shipping lanes between Europe and Asia, putting seamen, vessels and cargoes at risk and costing shippers huge sums to protect themselves.
Navies remain stretched in combating piracy due to the vast distances involved as seaborne gangs expand their capabilities. This has led to a growing number of shipping companies seeking to hire armed security guards on treacherous routes.
Seafarers are also increasingly backing the deployment of armed guards despite potential legal issues in case of fatalities.
"This is a geopolitical problem," association spokesman Jan Fritz Hansen told Reuters. "If piracy continues to expand the way it is just now, this will be a black spot on the world map."
Up to now, Danish ships have been allowed to engage private armed guards in extreme circumstances, such as when navy escorts are not available or when vessels are caught in ports and fear pirates lie waiting for them just outside the harbour.
Alternatively ships are sometimes guarded by mariners assigned to them from navy vessels escorting them through dangerous waters.
"Our general attitude is that we would not like to arm our vessels -- we would like the navy to do that," said Hansen who speaks for the Danish shipping industry that carries 10 percent of world trade.
But because that is not always practical, Danish shipowners want easier permission to engage private armed guards more frequently than they do now, though Hansen said that it would still be an exceptional measure, not something for all ships.
Hansen said the threshold could be lowered for instance for slow vessels or those that give up changing routes to avoid pirates or if new security concerns emerge in a certain area.
Authorities could make it speedier to hire armed guards by a system of advance registration of guards, Hansen said.
Pirates are increasingly using larger "mother vessels", sometimes seized from fishermen, which enable them to operate more widely on the open seas than the small skiffs they tend to favour when boarding ships, Hansen said.
So the Danish association also called on Thursday on the international community to see what governments and navies could do "to intercept them, destroy them, sink them," Hansen said.
"We have to leave that to the professionals, but we want to point out that it is a crucial measure to limit the success of the pirates," Hansen said. (Reporting by John Acher; editing by Noah Barkin)
Source: Reuters