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Pirates off Somalia, but have you heard of the Malacca Strait? |
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Posted by Truth About Trade & Technology
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Friday, 21 November 2008 |
The pirates off Somalia have been the media darling as of late with their brazen activity. In typical media fashion, they're the 'flavor of the month' with numerous articles, editorials and news coverage - especially after their hi-jacking of the Aramco oil tanker which of course tends to catch attention. But piracy has been quite a problem for years in disrupting trade routes, just ask Lloyds of London the global insurer.
As with so many other issues, sometimes it just takes time for a media light to fall on an event that catches pubic attention (like hi-jacking oil tankers). But piracy on the high seas has been an issue that has never gone away, and it's not a romanticized version of an Errol Flynn Hollywood movie. It's an international problem that affects trade by disrupting vital shipping route, endangering crews, raising the costs of transportation which effects producers and consumers alike with higher costs to export and import goods.
The point in the title of 'but have you heard about the Malacca Strait' is that this is an area several hundred miles long off Southeast Asia that is an incredibly vital shipping route to Singapore that most people have never heard about. It's also an area that too has been plagued by piracy.
The October 2007 National Geographic magazine had a solid informative piece worth reading (Dangerous Straits - Dark Passage: The Strait of Malacca. Pirates haunt it. Sailors fear it, Global trade depends on it) that has a little more human drama to it than a typical news story or economic analysis.
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