The article I'm blogging about I found here in the Daily Nation. The article is discussing piracy in Africa. Somalia seems to be where most of these problem pirates are coming from. The article says that alot of places have had to increase shipping charges on freights because ships are having to take longer routes to avoid Somali pirates. According to the article, a ship from Mumbai in India used to take twelve days at sea and it now takes eighteen days because they've had to change their route further South by Madagascar. And ships from Dubai to Mombasa used to take six days and now take twelve to avoid Somalia. Also according to the article, pirates have attacked sixteen ships and successfully hijacked five of them in East African waters in just a month, three in the last three weeks.
I chose to blog about this topic because it is one that can be and has been brought up in American news, which isn't often the case with other topics I've chosen. Somali pirates I've really noticed stories about in the news and such in the last year or two, but that's just me noticing so I'm not sure the real timeline. The article isn't a real long one but from it, it leaves me questioning why Somalia doesn't have better regulations on boats and letting them out into the sea. Also, why doesn't the Somalian government have more patrol boats and government type boats out in the sea to stop this from happening so often? I'm not for sure, but I think the U.S. has a lot patroling type stuff and the Coast Guard and whatnot. It's really a shame that these pirates have caused higher shipping charges and besides that, extra fuel to make the trips. I really think that we should be moving into a "green" era and pirates are definately preventing that when they make ships travel further.
According to this youtube clip about Somali Pirates, they say that the government is somewhat involved, even taking percentages of ransoms. It's an interesting three minute clip.
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