Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Quote in The Daily Voice on Somali piracy

A recent article in The Daily Voice ("Black America's Daily News Source") quotes from my recent remarks at a Somali piracy conference. Jeff Winbush, former editor of The Columbus Post, writes:
In a purely cost/benefit analysis, it's been cheaper to pay the pirates than it is to fight them. The problem is as anyone could see is paying millions of dollars to the pirates only encourages them to seize more ships and demand ever greater ransoms. "All the world's naval forces do not have enough available ships to protect the 20,000 vessels that pass through the Gulf of Aden annually and the wider 2.5 million square miles of ocean where Somali pirate attacks occurred in recent years," said U.S. Horn of Africa scholar David Shinn in a recent paper.