A RECORD NUMBER OF PEOPLE were taken hostage at sea in 2010, according to the latest figures by a maritime piracy monitoring group.

Pirates kidnapped 1,181 sailors and killed eight last year, according to the International Chamber of Commerce’s International Maritime Bureau (IMB).

A total of 53 ships were hijacked, 49 of them off the Somali coast.

Pirate attacks have increased annually for the last four years, according to the IMB, with the number of reported attacks up 10% in 2010 on the previous year.

Captain Mukundan, director of the IMB’s Piracy Reporting Centre said the increase was alarming:

As a percentage of global incidents, piracy on the high seas has increased dramatically over armed robbery in territorial waters. On the high seas off Somalia, heavily armed pirates are overpowering ocean-going fishing or merchant vessels to use as a base for further attacks.  They capture the crew and force them to sail to within attacking distance of other unsuspecting vessels.

Despite an overall increase in piracy, the number of attacks in the Gulf of Aden fell last year, a shift the IMB attributes to patrols by international naval forces in the area. However, that clearly hasn’t deterred pirates off the Somali coast, which accounted for 92% of all ships seized last year.

Somali pirates are also reported to be travelling further, reaching the Mozambique Channel in December 2010.

Last week, a report from US-based think tank One Earth Future Foundation said that piracy was costing the world economy up to €8.97bn every year.

That report said that ransoms paid to Somali pirates had increased from an average of €112,000 to over €4m in the past five years. The largest single ransom known to have been handed over is an incredible €7.1m ($9.5m) for a Korean oil tanker in November 2010.

Prevention?

Captain Mukundan said the main method of preventing piracy is to encourage stability in Somalia. He said there is “a desperate need for a stable infrastructure” in south central Somalia:

It is vital that governments and the United Nations devote resources to developing workable administrative infrastructures to prevent criminals from exploiting the vacuum left from years of failed local government.

All measures taken at sea to limit the activities of the pirates are undermined because of a lack of responsible authority back in Somalia from where the pirates begin their voyages and return with hijacked vessels.

With a population of around 10m, Somalia has been without effective government since the collapse of its socialist system in 1991. In 2009, international aid groups pulled their foreign staff out of Somali over kidnapping concerns.

The IMB runs the only manned 24-hour piracy report centre based in Malaysia to help coordinate rescue efforts for attacked crews, and posts live updates of reported incidents on its website and on Twitter.