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London - Oil tanker hijacks off Somalia like the recent record seizure of a Saudi supertanker threaten to push up fuel prices for hard-pressed consumers in Europe and North America, experts said on Tuesday.
The Sirius Star, a supertanker with a $100m Saudi oil cargo, was seized over the weekend - the largest ship ever seized by pirates and at 420 nautical miles the furthest hijacking off the coast yet by Somali pirates, according the US Navy.
"If shipping companies take the view that it's now too dangerous to go through the Gulf of Aden and do decide to take the much longer route around South Africa, there will be extra costs involved," Roger Middleton, author of "Piracy in Somalia: Threatening Global Trade, Feeding Local Wars", told AFP.
"Somebody is going to have to pay for that and it's most likely going to be consumers in Europe and North America," warned the consultant researcher on Africa for Chatham House, the London-based international affairs think-tank.
Middleton warned that Somali pirates now posed a serious threat to international trade.
The longer route from the Gulf to the West would add three weeks onto the delivery time of oil and gas, with the consumer likely to bear the cost, he added.
The International Maritime Bureau, a focal point in the fight against crime at sea, is pressing governments to provide more resources for their navies policing such vital sea trade routes.
IMB manager Cyrus Mody said the spate of Somali-based hijackings had pushed up insurance premiums for vessel owners plying the Gulf of Aden/Suez Canal route, which has driven up freight rates.
"It will be ordinary people who pay for it, so definitely it is affecting all of us on a very global basis," he told AFP.
"The entire world is going through financial crisis and this is only going to enhance it. So it has to be dealt with on face value at an operational level - and it has to be dealt with really fast."
He added: "Two companies have already stated that they are going to go round Africa to avoid the Gulf of Aden until the situation is brought under control."
And pushing tankers further away from the fastest route round Africa will only increase costs and fuel consumption further, he warned.
"The greater good would be to deal with the situation rather than to try and find ways round it," he said.
Robust action
Mody said governments needed to look at changing their rules of engagement and capturing the pirates' mother vessels, which would act as a deterrant and buy time by disrupting their activities.
"Definitely a more robust action by the navies should be taken," he insisted.
Graeme Gibbon Brooks, managing director of Dryad Maritime Intelligence Service, said international warships needed to act pre-emptively.
"The coalition has suppressed a number of attacks," he said.
"But there will never be enough warships. The whole area is 2.5 million square miles (6.5 million square kilometres)."
Olivier Jakob, the managing director of Petromatrix, a Swiss-based independent research group specialised in the oil markets, said prices would be affected if the capture of a supertanker like the Sirius Star was not an isolated attack.
"We would see an oil impact only on a second hijack," he said.
"Up to now it was the Suez route that was under pirate threat, but this attack was on the Cape route," he added.
"The Indian Ocean is a bit wider than the Gulf of Aden so we don't see any real risk apart from vessels taking a longer route further away from the African continent which would add a bit of voyage time.
"Vessel owners won't mind that much in an environment of low demand," he added, referring to a slump in demand for oil as the global economic downturn deepens.
- AFP
