Ninety Percent of Everything

4 ideas

1. Voyage aboard the Maersk Kendal

   Rose George sailed for about five weeks as a passenger on the Maersk Kendal, a Danish-owned, British-flagged container ship, from Felixstowe to Singapore via the Suez Canal and the pirate-threatened Gulf of Aden. Aboard, she found a small multinational crew running a vessel carrying thousands of containers on a tight schedule, working long watches in isolation, with brief port calls at automated terminals far from any town. The voyage shows how a ship that moves a vast quantity of consumer goods is run by a few people whom the consumers of those goods never see.

2. Flags of convenience as regulatory arbitrage

   A shipowner can register a vessel in an 'open registry' state such as Panama, Liberia or the Marshall Islands, which may have no real connection to the owner, the crew or the cargo. Registration buys the flag state's lighter taxes, labor rules and enforcement. Because of this, a ship's owner, operator, crew agency and flag can sit in four different jurisdictions, which diffuses accountability when crews are abandoned, unpaid or injured.

3. Invisibility as the cost of efficiency

   Containerization, automated ports sited far from cities, and fast turnarounds have made shipping extremely cheap. The same changes have removed it from public view, so the people and harms behind trade drop out of consumers' awareness. Look at any cheap imported good as the output of a hidden system whose labor conditions, environmental damage and risks go unexamined because no one sees them.

4. Shipping's environmental harm escapes land-based scrutiny

   Ships burn heavy, high-sulfur bunker fuel and produce underwater noise that disrupts whales and other marine life that communicate by sound. Most of this happens on the high seas, beyond national jurisdictions, so these pollutants have been regulated far more loosely than comparable emissions from cars or factories. The industry's scale and its location offshore let it pollute heavily while attracting little public attention.

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