Ships flying flags of convenience make it difficult to assign accountability for disasters.
When the Felicity Ace, a car-carrying cargo ship, caught fire last month in the Atlantic, it proceeded to capture the world’s attention—not because the crew of 22 was in danger, or that it would pollute the Azores ecosystem—but because it was full of luxury cars. The 4,000 cars onboard included 1,000 Porches and 200 Bentleys and Lamborghinis, according to a report by New York Times.
Many of the cars were electric vehicles (EVs) with lithium-ion batteries, making the fire inextinguishable. After smoldering for two weeks, the ship finally sank.
If you were worried about the crew, you didn’t need to be. They all safely abandoned the doomed ship as soon as the fire started.
The Felicity Ace was a midsize cargo ship. The Ever Given, famous for getting stuck in the Suez Canal for almost a week in 2021, is twice the length of the Felicity and its cargo was twice the value (estimated at $775 million).
It may have been amusing to think that by catching fire the Felicity Ace denied millionaires their luxury cars. You may have looked on in horror at the waste of such fine machines, as when James Bond crashes his Aston Martin, but the incident is just one horror in the long string of horrors that have plagued the maritime trade to this day.
What’s Wrong with Maritime Shipping?
Ninety Percent of Everything (title of a book by Rose George), from the clothes on our back to the cars we drive, arrives on ships. We should be more aware of maritime shipping, but while the maritime fleet has become bigger and more indispensable than ever before in history, it has also remained out of sight for a land-based people that covers long distances by flying. Grandpa may drone on about the Liberty ships crossing the Atlantic to supply the allies during World War II. Your history teacher may have tried to educate you about the Medieval spice trade, most of it conducted by ships, or how much faster the clippers were compared to other ships.
Novelist Joseph Conrad served 19 years on merchant ships, with his last voyage occurring in 1894. The gallantry and romance of the old merchant fleet may have been an invention of writers such as Conrad, creating an enthralled audience that decorated their houses with nautical motifs and intricate models of the sailing ships in bottles. It is harder to romanticize the workmanlike steamship or the cargo ship of today piled high with containers. Not even when the pandemic broke supply chains did we become interested in the ships that began clogging our ports.
Approximately 50,000 cargo ships are currently out at sea. These ships are largely unseen, yet their effect on world trade is undeniable, their effect on the environment is significant, and the social cost of the crew is enormous.
Cargo ships typically burn heavy bunker fuel, a thick carbon-intensive sludge left over when crude oil is refined. Collectively, they emit a billion metric tons of CO2 . If they were a country, cargo ships would be sixth in terms of their carbon emissions and ahead of Germany, according to a 2018 World Economic Forum report.
To drive down costs, the crew of a cargo ship is reduced to the absolute minimum. Shipping companies, unburdened by regulation, make crews work around the clock, sleeping in short shifts, says George, who documents her journey on the Maersk Kendal. Undermanned and unarmed, cargo ships are unable to fend off pirate attacks. Flying flags of convenience, sometimes of landlocked countries with no navies, they have no protection. Owners and operators, safe in their industrial countries, with crews from China, the Philippines and Indonesia, are quick to lose interest in their ships after writing off the losses. Crews were abandoned on ships in record numbers in 2021, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Flags of Convenience
Flying flags of convenience allows ship owners to skirt the taxes and laws of their own countries. Laws against whaling, overfishing, polluting, and even murder are often never investigated and seldom solved.
Maersk, the Danish company operating the world’s biggest fleet of container ships, registers its ships in Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the U.S., as well as its native Denmark.