

Somewhere on the world's waterways, a pirate will try to strike today. Another will tomorrow. And another the day after that. Piracy is on the rise, across the globe – up nearly 75%, from last decade to this one, according to a new report from the RAND Corporation. There's now at least an attempt at a pirate attack nearly every day.

Why? Mainly, the RAND report says, because there are now more targets to loot. "First and most fundamentally, there has been a massive increase in commercial maritime traffic. Combined with the large number of ports around the world, this growth has provided pirates with an almost limitless range of tempting, high-payoff targets."

And while some governments (and some reporters) have worries about pirates and terrorists teaming up, "the presumed convergence between maritime terrorism and piracy remains highly questionable, however. To date, there has been no credible evidence to support speculation about such a nexus emerging."

There were "a total of 2,463 actual or attempted acts of piracy were registered around the world between 2000 and the end of 2006. This represents an annual average incident rate of 352, a substantial increase over the mean of 209 recorded for the period of 1994–1999," the report notes.

"The concentration of pirate attacks continues to be greatest in

Southeast Asia, especially in the waters around the Indonesian archipelago... which accounted for roughly 25 percent of all global incidents during 2006."

The post-9/11 environment has also made some shipping lanes more vulnerable. Since then, governments have been pressured to "to invest in expensive, land-based homeland security initiatives" – often ignoring maritime security, as a result. In addition:

...lax coastal and port-side security have played an important role in enabling low-level piratical activity, especially harbor thefts of goods from ships at anchor. ...corruption and emergent voids of judicial prerogative have encouraged official complicity in high-level pirate rings, which has impacted directly on the “phantom ship” phenomenon. *...the global proliferation of small arms has provided pirates

(as well as terrorists and other criminal elements) with an enhanced means to operate on a more destructive and sophisticated level.

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