Inside the secret shipping industry

Almost everything we own and use, at some point, travels to us by container ship, through a vast network of ocean routes and ports that most of us know almost nothing about. Journalist Rose George tours us through the world of shipping, the underpinning of consumer civilization.

A couple of years ago,

Harvard Business School chose

the best business model of that year.

It chose Somali piracy.

Pretty much around the same time,

I discovered that there were 544 seafarers

being held hostage on ships,

often anchored just off the Somali coast

in plain sight.

And I learned these two facts, and I thought,

what's going on in shipping?

And I thought, would that happen
in any other industry?

Would we see 544 airline pilots

held captive in their jumbo jets

on a runway for months, or a year?

Would we see 544 Greyhound bus drivers?

It wouldn't happen.

So I started to get intrigued.

And I discovered another fact,

which to me was more astonishing

almost for the fact that I hadn't known it before

at the age of 42, 43.

That is how fundamentally
we still depend on shipping.

Because perhaps the general public

thinks of shipping as an old-fashioned industry,

something brought by sailboat

with Moby Dicks and Jack Sparrows.

But shipping isn't that.

Shipping is as crucial to us as it has ever been.

Shipping brings us 90 percent of world trade.

Shipping has quadrupled in size since 1970.

We are more dependent on it now than ever.

And yet, for such an enormous industry --

there are a 100,000 working vessels on the sea —

it's become pretty much invisible.

Now that sounds absurd in Singapore to say that,

because here shipping is so present

that you stuck a ship on top of a hotel.

(Laughter)

But elsewhere in the world,

if you ask the general public what they know

about shipping and how much
trade is carried by sea,

you will get essentially a blank face.

You will ask someone on the street

if they've heard of Microsoft.

I should think they'll say yes,

because they'll know that they make software

that goes on computers,

and occasionally works.

But if you ask them if they've heard of Maersk,

I doubt you'd get the same response,

even though Maersk,

which is just one shipping company amongst many,

has revenues pretty much on a par with Microsoft.

[$60.2 billion]

Now why is this?

A few years ago,

the first sea lord of the British admiralty --

he is called the first sea lord,

although the chief of the army is not called a land lord —

he said that we, and he meant

in the industrialized nations in the West,

that we suffer from sea blindness.

We are blind to the sea

as a place of industry or of work.

It's just something we fly over,

a patch of blue on an airline map.

Nothing to see, move along.

So I wanted to open my own eyes

to my own sea blindness,

so I ran away to sea.

A couple of years ago, I took a passage

on the Maersk Kendal,

a mid-sized container ship

carrying nearly 7,000 boxes,

and I departed from Felixstowe,

on the south coast of England,

and I ended up right here in Singapore

five weeks later,

considerably less jet-lagged than I am right now.

And it was a revelation.

We traveled through five seas,

two oceans, nine ports,

and I learned a lot about shipping.

And one of the first things that surprised me

when I got on board Kendal

was, where are all the people?

I have friends in the Navy who tell me

they sail with 1,000 sailors at a time,

but on Kendal there were only 21 crew.

Now that's because shipping is very efficient.

Containerization has made it very efficient.

Ships have automation now.

They can operate with small crews.

But it also means that, in the words

of a port chaplain I once met,

the average seafarer you're going to find

on a container ship is either tired or exhausted,

because the pace of modern shipping

is quite punishing for what the shipping calls

its human element,

a strange phrase which they don't seem to realize

sounds a little bit inhuman.

So most seafarers now working on container ships

often have less than two hours in port at a time.

They don't have time to relax.

They're at sea for months at a time,

and even when they're on board,

they don't have access to what

a five-year-old would take for granted, the Internet.

And another thing that surprised me
when I got on board Kendal

was who I was sitting next to --

Not the queen; I can't imagine why
they put me underneath her portrait --

But around that dining table in the officer's saloon,

I was sitting next to a Burmese guy,

I was opposite a Romanian, a Moldavian, an Indian.

On the next table was a Chinese guy,

and in the crew room, it was entirely Filipinos.

So that was a normal working ship.

Now how is that possible?

Because the biggest dramatic change

in shipping over the last 60 years,

when most of the general public stopped noticing it,

was something called an open registry,

or a flag of convenience.

Ships can now fly the flag of any nation

that provides a flag registry.

You can get a flag from the landlocked nation

of Bolivia, or Mongolia,

or North Korea, though that's not very popular.

(Laughter)

So we have these very multinational,

global, mobile crews on ships.

And that was a surprise to me.

And when we got to pirate waters,

down the Bab-el-Mandeb strait
and into the Indian Ocean,

the ship changed.

And that was also shocking, because suddenly,

I realized, as the captain said to me,

that I had been crazy to choose to go

through pirate waters on a container ship.

We were no longer allowed on deck.

There were double pirate watches.

And at that time, there were those
544 seafarers being held hostage,

and some of them were held hostage for years

because of the nature of shipping
and the flag of convenience.

Not all of them, but some of them were,

because for the minority
of unscrupulous ship owners,

it can be easy to hide behind

the anonymity offered by some flags of convenience.

What else does our sea blindness mask?

Well, if you go out to sea on a ship

or on a cruise ship, and look up to the funnel,

you'll see very black smoke.

And that's because shipping

has very tight margins,
and they want cheap fuel,

so they use something called bunker fuel,

which was described to me
by someone in the tanker industry

as the dregs of the refinery,

or just one step up from asphalt.

And shipping is the greenest method of transport.

In terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile,

it emits about a thousandth of aviation

and about a tenth of trucking.

But it's not benign, because there's so much of it.

So shipping emissions are
about three to four percent,

almost the same as aviation's.

And if you put shipping emissions

on a list of the countries' carbon emissions,

it would come in about sixth,

somewhere near Germany.

It was calculated in 2009 that the 15 largest ships

pollute in terms of particles and soot

and noxious gases

as much as all the cars in the world.

And the good news is that

people are now talking about sustainable shipping.

There are interesting initiatives going on.

But why has it taken so long?

When are we going to start talking and thinking

about shipping miles as well as air miles?

I also traveled to Cape Cod to look

at the plight of the North Atlantic right whale,

because this to me was one
of the most surprising things

about my time at sea,

and what it made me think about.

We know about man's impact on the ocean

in terms of fishing and overfishing,

but we don't really know much about

what's happening underneath the water.

And in fact, shipping has a role to play here,

because shipping noise has contributed

to damaging the acoustic
habitats of ocean creatures.

Light doesn't penetrate beneath
the surface of the water,

so ocean creatures like whales and dolphins

and even 800 species of fish

communicate by sound.

And a North Atlantic right whale

can transmit across hundreds of miles.

A humpback can transmit a sound

across a whole ocean.

But a supertanker can also be heard

coming across a whole ocean,

and because the noise that
propellers make underwater

is sometimes at the same frequency that whales use,

then it can damage their acoustic habitat,

and they need this for breeding,

for finding feeding grounds,

for finding mates.

And the acoustic habitat of the
North Atlantic right whale

has been reduced by up to 90 percent.

But there are no laws governing
acoustic pollution yet.

And when I arrived in Singapore,

and I apologize for this, but I
didn't want to get off my ship.

I'd really loved being on board Kendal.

I'd been well treated by the crew,

I'd had a garrulous and entertaining captain,

and I would happily have signed up
for another five weeks,

something that the captain also said

I was crazy to think about.

But I wasn't there for nine months at a time

like the Filipino seafarers,

who, when I asked them to describe their job to me,

called it "dollar for homesickness."

They had good salaries,

but theirs is still an isolating and difficult life

in a dangerous and often difficult element.

But when I get to this part, I'm in two minds,

because I want to salute those seafarers

who bring us 90 percent of everything

and get very little thanks or recognition for it.

I want to salute the 100,000 ships

that are at sea

that are doing that work, coming in and out

every day, bringing us what we need.

But I also want to see shipping,

and us, the general public,
who know so little about it,

to have a bit more scrutiny,

to be a bit more transparent,

to have 90 percent transparency.

Because I think we could all benefit

from doing something very simple,

which is learning to see the sea.

Thank you.

(Applause)