Although the problem of Somali pirates carrying out attacks within port limits is new, attacks and robberies in West African ports are unfortunately common and also on the rise, although the pirates’ aims in West Africa are very different.<\/p>\n
While West African pirates do sometimes demand ransoms for ship crews, they generally target oil cargoes and fuel supplies and either hijack vessels or carry out ship-to-ship transfers to load fuel and cargoes on to their own vessels.<\/p>\n
This is having a significant effect on West African ports. In Nigeria, the port fees and levies have increased so dramatically that trade is being diverted to Cotonou, where the charges are much lower. However, the pirates seem to have simply adapted their operations accordingly and the number of attacks off Benin have risen sharply this year, especially considering that there were no attacks at all off the coast of Benin in 2010.<\/p>\n
As Benin relies on port activities for nearly 40% of its government revenue, if this trend in piracy attacks continues and ships begin to avoid Benin as a result, the impact on their ports (and the rest of the country as a consequence) will be considerable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Although the problem of Somali pirates carrying out attacks within port limits is new, attacks and robberies in West African ports are unfortunately common and also on the rise, although the pirates aims in West Africa are very different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-1810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-concessions-investments"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1810"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=1810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}