African elephants inch closer to extinction as poaching and habitat loss hit hard

Situation is bleak but some conservation efforts are working well

by Fermin Koop
March 26, 2021
in Animals, Environment, News, Science


The African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) is now listed as Critically Endangered and the African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) as Endangered on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. They’re more in danger than they have ever been, and it’s mostly due to habitat reduction and ivory trade.

Image credit: Flickr / S.Imeon

They are the world’s largest land animals, measuring up to 7.5 meters long and weighing over six tons. The emblematic savannah elephant roams grassy plants and woodlands, while the forest elephant lives in the equatorial forest of central and western Africa. Their trunk is used for communication and handling objects, including food. They’re also team players — not just among their own species, but across the entire ecosystem.


“They play key roles in ecosystems, economies, and in our collective imagination all over the world. The new IUCN Red List assessments underline the persistent pressures faced by these iconic animals,” Bruno Oberle, IUCN Director-General, said in a statement. “We must urgently put an end to poaching and ensure that sufficient suitable habitat is conserved.”

Before the new update, African elephants were treated as a single species, listed as Vulnerable by IUCN. This is the first time the two species have been assessed separately for the Red List – the result of a consensus that emerged among experts following new research into the genetics of the elephant populations.

Only 415,000 elephants remain in Africa but the number has fallen drastically during the past three decades, IUCN said. The number of African forest elephants fell by more than 86% over a period of 31 years, while the population of African savanna elephants decreased by at least 60% over the last 50 years, according to the most recent assessments — and the numbers continue to drop.

Both species have suffered declines due to an increase in poaching, which peaked in 2011 but continues to threaten populations. This adds up with the ongoing conversion of their habitats to agriculture. The situation changes from country to country. Botswana has too many elephants for its ecosystem, for example, while on a continent-scale they are declining.

“With persistent demand for ivory and escalating human pressures on Africa’s wildlands, concern for Africa’s elephants is high, and the need to creatively conserve and wisely manage these animals and their habitats are more acute than ever,” Kathleen Gobush, lead assessor of the African elephants at IUCN, said in a statement.

The IUCN assessment also highlighted the impact of successful conservation efforts, such as anti-poaching measures, more supportive legislation, and land-use planning. Some forest elephants have stabilized in conservation areas in Gabon and Congo, while savanna elephant numbers have been stable or growing in the Kavango-Zambezi conservation area.

Isla Duporge from the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at the University of Oxford told the BBC that “while on the surface this looks bleak, the fact it’s being flagged is actually positive.” She highlighted the work done by conservation organization “on the ground in Africa” and said they are the most crucial players in the effort to protect the elephants.

Fermin Koop

Fermin Koop is a reporter from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He holds an MSc from Reading University (UK) on Environment and Development and is specialized in environment and climate change news.

The scapegoating of Asian Americans


Protesters during a rally held to support Stop Asian Hate 

in Newton, Mass., on March 21. INTERNATONAL DAY AGAINST RACISM
AP Photo/Steven Senne


BY Liz Mineo 

Harvard Staff Writer
March 24, 2021

The Atlanta shootings that killed eight people, six of them Asian women, took place amid an upsurge in anti-Asian violence during the pandemic. Authorities say the suspect, a 21-year-old white man, has confessed to the attacks and blames a sex addiction for his actions. They have not yet charged him with hate crimes, and legal experts say such a case may be difficult to establish.

But for Courtney Sato, a postdoctoral fellow in The Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the general rise in hostility that serves as the tragedy’s backdrop is part of the nation’s long history of brutal bigotry against Asian Americans.

“The important thing to remember is that this is really not an exceptional moment by any means,” said Sato. “But it’s really part of a much longer genealogy of anti-Asian violence that reaches as far back as the 19th century.”

Sato pointed to the Chinese massacre of 1871, when a mob in Los Angeles’ Chinatown attacked and murdered 19 Chinese residents, including a 15-year-old boy, a reflection of the growing anti-Asian sentiment that came to its climax with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The act banned the immigration of Chinese laborers, much as the Page Exclusion Act of 1875, the nation’s first restrictive immigration law, had prohibited the entry of Chinese women.

Sato said the Page Exclusion Act is a precursor to the dehumanizing narratives and tropes that render Asian woman as objects of sexual fetishization and unworthy of being part of the national consciousness.

“In the 1875 Act, we see the ways in which race and gender are beginning to be entangled and codified in the law, and how Asian women were deemed to be bringing in sexual deviancy,” said Sato. “That far back, we can see how racism and sexism were being conflated.”


Japanese American detainees in front of poster with internment orders in 1942.
Photo by Dorthea Lange/Records of War Relocation Authority, Record Group 210; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD


In modern American history, Asian Americans have been regularly scapegoated during periods of national duress. World War II saw the forced internment of about 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast — an estimated 62 percent of whom were U.S. citizens — in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the Vietnam War, refugees from Southeast Asia faced routine discrimination and hate, including attacks by Ku Klux Klan members on shrimpers in Texas. And in 1982, Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was beaten to death by two Detroit autoworkers who thought he was Japanese. The killing took place during a recession that was partly blamed on the rise of the Japanese auto industry.

In a letter to the Harvard community, President Larry Bacow condemned the Atlanta shootings and stressed that the University stands against anti-Asian racism and all kinds of hate and bigotry.

“For the past year, Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders have been blamed for the pandemic — slander born of xenophobia and ignorance,” wrote Bacow. “Harvard must stand as a bulwark against hatred and bigotry. We welcome and embrace individuals from every background because it makes us a better community, a stronger community. An attack on any group of us is an attack on all of us — and on everything we represent as an institution.

“To Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders in our community: We stand together with you today and every day going forward,” Bacow wrote.

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, whose mother is a South Asian immigrant, also condemned the attacks. “Racism is real in America, and it has always been,” said Harris before meeting with community leaders and the families of the victims in Atlanta. “Xenophobia is real in America and always has been. Sexism, too.”

Between March 2020 and February 2021, Stop AAPI Hate, an initiative supporting Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander communities led by several Asian American advocacy groups and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University, reported nearly 3,800 anti-Asian hate incidents in the U.S.

Asian Americans have been physically attacked, verbally harassed, spat upon, and subjected to racial slurs. In February, an 84-yeard old Thai man died after he was shoved to the ground in Oakland, California’s Chinatown. Since the start of the pandemic, Asian Americans have become the target of xenophobic attacks, much like Muslims were blamed and scapegoated after the 9/11 attacks.

In a survey from the Pew Research Center, three in 10 Asian Americans reported having been subjected to racist slurs or jokes since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent study found that former President Donald Trump’s description of COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” led to a rise in anti-Asian hate online. Trump also used the racist term “Kung Flu” at a youth rally in Arizona.


Last spring, Jason Beckfield (pictured) and Vivian Shaw launched a project to study the pandemic’s impact on AAPI communities. Rose Lincoln/Harvard file photo

Last March, Vivian Shaw, a College Fellow in the Department of Sociology, and Jason Beckfield, professor of sociology, launched the AAPI COVID-19 Project to examine the pandemic’s impact on the AAPI communities. UNESCO is now a partner in the research project. The project’s latest report, based on interviews conducted between June and October of 2020, found that Asian Americans are dealing with multiple forms of risk, including the threat of anti-Asian violence, in their daily lives. Some Asian American grocery-store owners reported being conflicted about forcing customers to wear face masks because they were afraid of violent reactions, despite their fear of exposure to the virus. The pandemic has also exacerbated social inequities as some Asian Americans — many of them immigrants — work in the underground economy, can’t access unemployment benefits, lack health insurance, and may be subjected to police harassment.

“This pandemic has affected the most vulnerable of the vulnerable,” said Shaw, the lead researcher for the project. “When we talk about anti-Asian racism, it’s not within a vacuum. It’s within the context of these broader structures: race, gender, immigration status, socio-economic condition. All of that impacts people.”

Beckfield said that while the project’s goal is to study the pandemic’s effects on the Asian American community at large, it also looks to elevate their voices and find recommendations to fight anti-Asian racism and all xenophobia.

“We have to recognize that anti-racism is not just the burden or the project of the people who are being targeted by those in power,” said Beckfield. “It ought to be the project of people who are in power too.”

On March 18, after the Atlanta killings, the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Association, along with other Harvard affinity groups, conducted a vigil and started a fundraiser to support Asian American advocacy groups in Boston and Atlanta, and two nationwide organizations.

Sun-Jung Yum ’23 and Racheal Lama ’23, co-presidents of the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Association, said the Atlanta killings have shaken the community, but that they have found strength in joining forces and working together.
“This pandemic has affected the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. When we talk about anti-Asian racism, it’s not within a vacuum.”
— Vivian Shaw

“It’s taking a toll on our Asian and Asian American peers in a way that people don’t realize,” said Lama. “But it’s amazing seeing how this younger generation is coming together and standing up for their parents and their older family members.”

Yum hopes that the Harvard community seizes the opportunity to continue the conversation about anti-Asian racism and not let it slip away. “It’s really important that not only do we donate now, but that we also keep on talking about this,” said Yum. “This is a great opportunity for us to not let it slide this time. I really hope that the Harvard community really continues to push advocacy and activism in this area.”

For Sato, the expert in Asian American Studies who is a postdoctoral fellow in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, it’s a critical moment for Americans to learn about the history of anti-Asian violence in the country and realize how it’s connected to the mistreatment of other ethnic minorities.

“Once again, this is really not an exceptional case,” said Sato, “but it’s deeply linked to the broader conversation we have been having in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. This is a very much connected history, and we need to really think about how this violence is not only impacting the Asian American community, but also Blacks, Indigenous, Latinx and other vulnerable communities.”

A long history of bigotry against Asian Americans – Harvard Gazette

‘Indian Sex Life’ and the control of women


Photo courtesy of Durba Mitra

Research, personal story frame professor’s new book


BY Jill Radsken

Harvard Staff Writer

June 11, 2020

The intellectual questions Durba Mitra asks are formed as much from her archival research as from her conversations with women on their experiences of social judgment and subordination and their efforts to challenge strict social norms. Perhaps no one has influenced her more than her own mother, who was open with Mitra, assistant professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, about the unique challenges of being an independent woman in a world that, too often, has little space for independent women.

 “Many communities have all sorts of expectations about women and young girls, about looks, about how one is supposed to comport oneself in a room, about how to be appropriate, about how deferential we are supposed to be. My mother was always very clear to me. There’s no deference to be had,” said Mitra, who recently published “Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought.”

Q&A

Durba Mitra

GAZETTE: You conceived this book from an academic place as well as a personal one. Can you speak about both?

MITRA: I was pre-med in college, but also a history major, and I was interested in the history of science and medicine. For my senior thesis, I wrote about the history of prostitution and women’s sexuality, and I found there was a feminist literature that could help me understand how to think about women’s sexuality historically. When I decided not to go to medical school I went to graduate school thinking that I would study this history of science and medicine, but ended up doing interdisciplinary feminist and queer studies. In the introduction to “Indian Sex Life,” I narrate how I went into archives thinking that I was looking for one kind of history: the social history of the many kinds of women who became prostitutes. What I found, instead, was that the word “prostitute” appeared across diverse archives that seemingly had nothing to do with prostitution, whether it was about laws around abortion and infanticide or sociological theories about social evolution and the conceptual visions of men who sought to create an ideal society based on patriarchal monogamy. I realized that my project and questions had to look different than I had initially imagined them. So that’s how I came to the book as an intellectual history of sexuality, a history of how ideas of women’s sexuality have been foundational to how we study modern society. The questions were rooted in the thinking about science and epistemology, but really the burning question was: How do we think about the ubiquity of women’s sexuality in the study of the past and futures of our societies? How have often deeply troubling ideas about the control and erasure of women’s sexuality shaped modern social theory?

The more personal story in this project comes from my experience growing up in a household with a single mother. I’m of South Asian descent and am first generation in the U.S. My experience of having a mother who was divorced made me realize that many of my intellectual questions come from experiences observing women who do not fit into socially normative roles, including my mother, who is this amazingly defiant person. She has accomplished a huge amount, a single mother to two children who got her Ph.D. while working full time as a professor for years. She moved her family across the world and eventually settled in Fargo, N.D. She often had more than one job to make ends meet. That early experience transformed me and made me deeply committed to thinking with women about their perspectives and shared forms of knowledge. I remember when I did my first year of fieldwork, standing with a woman in a kitchen, and she was talking about the kinds of herbs women commonly used to prevent pregnancy. These knowledges and practices, or remedies, were exchanged to create a shared knowledge about how to have control over their own reproduction. It’s the kind of shared knowledge that exists only between women. I realized that even though I would look at a document in an archive that told me one type of story, that through these kinds of conversations I could ask other kinds of historical questions and use historical methods of reading. So when I later read colonial textbook after colonial textbook that used condemnatory language to describe women’s health practices, I had these other structures of knowledge that helped me critically read outside the logic of deeply patriarchal, and often racist colonial ideas of Indian women.

This project is very much centered in the colonial period. It ends at the end of colonialism in the 1940s, but the reach of the project is much broader, and I feel it resonates with urgent issues today. What does it mean to write a history of the present conditions of sexual control and violence that endure, where the erasure of women’s desires and sexuality continues to be seen as a natural and inevitable fact of everyday life in postcolonial societies? Over diverse archives, from studies of ancient society to criminal law to forensic medicine, a wide range of women from all walks of life were classified as prostitutes. The idea of the prostitute was everywhere. Its ubiquity made me realize that something systematic was occurring, something that we had not yet accounted for. I had to shift my work to study intellectual concepts that shaped these ideas, not just particular women who were marginalized. There was a systemic issue at play. And I found in interdisciplinary feminist and queer studies the innovative methods of reading and analysis that I needed to write this urgent history.

GAZETTE: How did you come to find your way intellectually from your mother?
“As a woman, I was constantly asked why I was conducting research on such ‘distasteful topics,’ and limited access to archives made my experience of telling this story fragmented, with sudden starts and stops.”


MITRA: I’m very much shaped by her intellectually. She’s a statistician. Interestingly, I find that the principles of her discipline have shaped so much of what I study, how we write about and study modern societies. So, in my own work, I look at how modern social theory studies social deviation, how correlation is a key concern in the comparative study of civilizations, and how modern societies create social norms around sexuality and marriage.

It took a lot of defiance on my mother’s part for her to live the life that she does, but also to let me be the person that I am. Many communities have all sorts of expectations about women and young girls, about looks, about how one is supposed to comport oneself in a room, about how to be appropriate, how deferential we are supposed to be. My mother was always very clear to me. There’s no deference to be had. Your job is to be a leader. Your job is to be an ethical person, to ask critical questions, to challenge social expectations that see you as secondary to men. That is what she was doing every day. But she is also deeply informed by her own history, her own training, her own life experiences. She is a great chef of Bengali cuisine. She practices very intricate forms of embroidery and artwork that she has learned since she was a little girl. So she also exceled at more gendered, less socially recognized forms of labor and artistic practice. The other side of this life was that I saw her experience very painful acts of social exclusion. It was quite unusual to be a divorced woman in the South Asian diaspora in the 1970s and 1980s. That experience of social exclusion made me defiant. As a prominent scholar once said to me, “You almost have to be outside inside to be able to write a book that critiques society for the kind of foundational exclusions that are part of the way it imagines itself.” I believe my work is deeply informed by that insider-outsider perspective.

GAZETTE: Can you talk about the women you found in your archival discoveries?

MITRA: It took a long time to resolve how to tell this story, because what I thought would be individual stories of women turned into a much more abstract, much more conceptual history about the ubiquity of ideas of female sexuality that have organized how we study society. For example, in the chapter “Circularity” on the forensics of abortion, I start with a story from an official colonial archive, a coroner’s report, which tells us about a woman — a girl, really — who was widowed in adolescence, who dies of an alleged abortion after getting pregnant despite being unmarried. What I play out for the reader in the telling of that story is that there was no way to reassemble her life except from a report that was about her death. What does it mean to narrate a life from a report that was about death? What can we know about her life from a deeply sanitized report about a woman’s body at the time of her death? How can we think about the social exclusion that woman may have experienced, imagine a world that left her to be alone in her death, but also account for the structures of knowledge that only recorded women when they died, but had no interest in documenting them when they were alive?

This is the work of feminist and queer scholarship. I didn’t ever fully know how to tell this story until really after I completed my Ph.D., and I realized that the story I wanted to tell wasn’t simply about the individual fragment of this life, but about the ubiquity of a concept of deviant female sexuality that allowed for this archive to record this death, not as one of compassion, but through the language of a woman’s criminal intent. I wanted to account for how this archive organized how we understood society, and the limits of the histories we can tell from these official perspectives.
“Many communities have all sorts of expectations about women and young girls… My mother was always very clear to me. There’s no deference to be had.”


While my book “Indian Sex Life” is based on the empirical study of India, I don’t think it is unique to Indian society, or solely a study of one region of the world. As a scholar trained in gender and sexuality in South Asia and the comparative colonial and postcolonial world, what I am interested in is how the colonial world has been critical to how we study modern society across the world, how histories of colonial gender and sexuality have more broadly informed modern disciplines of social science.

GAZETTE: What were the challenges and what did it mean emotionally to confront these archival stories as such fragmented puzzles? What kind of feelings of responsibility come with that?

MITRA: It is a challenging project, one where I feel a deep sense of ethical responsibility to the histories I am telling.The death certificate of this woman’s life, the story of her body that is dissected, that is the only version of the story that I get of her. What does it mean to narrate this document? What are the ethics of confronting such an archive? Emotionally, this is where, in my view, feminist and queer studies do critical work to think of the limits of such archives. These fields offer powerful, essential forms of knowledge, because scholars of gender and sexuality ask questions about the affective dimensions of social and political life while also challenging ideologies that have made social exclusion seem natural and normal. I am influenced by these fields of study, including postcolonial and transnational feminisms, black feminist studies, and queer studies, which ask questions about how we deal with these fragmented archives and write fragmented lives.

For me, as a researcher, I think of this fragmentation in a few ways. First, my archives are not only fragmented in terms of the lives of people and how they appear in archives, but they are quite literally fragmented and scattered across the world as a result of the unequal project of the acquisition of knowledge that results from colonialism. This kind of project requires research in spaces you don’t anticipate you will go to find the materials you hope to find. So a lot of my materials about India were moved out of Indian libraries or archives to other places as a result of colonial structures of knowledge of where people and libraries in the metropole moved documents thousands of miles. Anyone working on India’s colonial period has to go to the British Library. You spend a lot of time in London, as well as in national and local archives across South Asia, but you may also end up in the Netherlands, or in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress. For my book, Widener Library has perhaps the most extraordinary collection of sources, including first editions of colonial ethnographies. There are these amazing books because of the preservation conditions. These materials are often better-preserved here than they might be elsewhere. But for me, there are ethical questions we must ask. What does it mean to find an account of an Indian woman’s autopsy in a medical library in London or New York, totally moved from the place of its production? Sometimes it means that we can only read the source out of context, far from the place it describes. When an undergraduate student checks that same book out from Widener, they don’t know why it is there. It bears no material marking of its long history of travel across the world as part of colonial circulation of documents, as part of state-sponsored programs of knowledge acquisition. Indeed, the title of my book comes from dozens of books that were circulated across the globe from the colonial and postcolonial world. They carry titles like “Indian Sex Life” and “Sex Life and Prostitution in India.”

The other key issue in this history of fragmentation is the particular challenges of being a woman researcher. There are always challenges to doing research alone, and I am very cognizant of it. It certainly shaped my experiences traveling across archives and geographies to gain access to critical sources that form the foundation of my book. I was often refused access to libraries and archives. As a woman, I was constantly asked why I was conducting research on such “distasteful topics,” and limited access to archives made my experience of telling this story fragmented, with sudden starts and stops. As a teacher and adviser, I try to advise my own students, including women, students of color, women of color, and queer students, about the unique challenges marginalized people face conducting archival and ethnographic research. There are starting to be more conversations about how we conduct research safely and effectively as minorities, women, queer people, transgender people, but we need to talk about it more, and we need programming that creates a sustained conversation about these issues to help train students.

GAZETTE: How does this all translate to the classroom, and what you are teaching?

MITRA: This semester I taught a course directly on my research from my first book called “The Sexual Life of Colonialism.” This course is based in the colonial/postcolonial world. It focuses on diverse geographies, including South Asia, Southeast Asia, Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa, and it looks at questions of same-sex sexuality, interracial sexuality, queer sexuality, transgender politics, and rights in those spaces and questions of disability. The other course I taught was “Solidarity: Transnational Women’s Rights from Suffrage to NGOs,” which is based on my book project that I’m working on now. My first book is about erasure and control of female sexuality in the making of modern social theory, while my second book moves forward in time to the later part of the 20th century to ask what happens when women take up intellectual life and systematically start to account for the conditions of women’s lives in the decolonizing world. In many ways, this project again circles back to my mother. Women of her generation and one generation before her were the first set of women to get Ph.D.s in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. So, unlike the colonial period, modern social theory is no longer just men studying women. Instead, with the writings of Third World women, I ask: What kind of radical imaginations do women have for the future of their societies that are more equitable for women?

My “Solidarity” class is part of the Long 19th Amendment Project, which is a Mellon-funded project at the Schlesinger Library. It was meant to be entirely taught in the library as a workshop or laboratory, with discussions and also work with primary materials. After our classroom went remote due to COVID-19, the course moved online, and we used the extraordinary digitized collections of the Schlesinger Library to work together in an online lab setting. I think, despite the challenges of moving to remote teaching, the course was a success because every class we came together to learn together through an encounter with archival objects and think critically about women’s issues, including issues exacerbated by COVID-19, from issues of unequal gendered distribution of housework to the dramatic increase in domestic violence as people stayed at home. The course was experimental, in an exciting way, and really showed how critically important it is to continue to study and teach women’s lives and struggles during this uncertain time.

Interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.

Research, personal story frame professor’s new book – Harvard Gazette

Finding a way forward on climate change


Rebecca Henderson (clockwise from upper left), Peter Huybers, Daniel Schrag, Jennifer Leaning, and Jim Stock discuss the way forward to fight climate change.

Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

Interdisciplinary panel untangles various global perspectives, solutions

BY Clea Simon

Harvard Correspondent
March 26, 2021

If the causes and problems of climate change are entwined, then the solutions must be as well. That was the consensus as Harvard faculty from a range of fields came together for “Confronting Climate Change: Diverse Perspectives on the Path Forward,” an online discussion co-sponsored by the Office of the Vice Provost for Advancement in Learning and the Harvard University Center for the Environment.

Moderator Daniel Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and professor of environmental science and engineering, opened Thursday evening’s session by asking about the interconnections between climate change and the pandemic, arguably the two most urgent global crises of the time.

“We know it’s going to get warmer,” said Peter Huybers, professor of Earth and planetary sciences and of environmental science and engineering. Citing “the underlying pressure due to climate change, droughts, seasonal floods,” he noted that “since 2015, the number of people who are undernourished has been increasing, and that has accelerated under COVID 19.”

Speaking about her experience in Africa, Jennifer Leaning, Harvard Medical School associate professor of emergency medicine, talked about how the pandemic has interrupted international cooperation at a critical time. “In Chad, in the semi-Sahel, which is verging with the Sahara, sources of water are disappearing,” said Leaning, an emergency room doctor by training. “They have always had a precarious income stream from trade, and trade has really dropped. The options for livelihood have diminished.”

The tipping point, they all agreed, has arrived. This past year, Schrag, who also serves as director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, said, “We saw fires and the melting of sea ice.” Leaning spoke about “distress migration,” movement of individuals and communities forced by climate change. “If people get really hungry, they’re going to move,” she said. “They’re going to be heading north.”

This crisis, however, may also be an opportunity. “For a long time, we couldn’t imagine something other than business as usual,” said Huybers. “This is an incredibly opportune time to engage around major international issues. We ought to try to capitalize on it.” Citing the principle of enlightened self-interest, he noted, “We have to contend with the welfare of others on this planet if we want to ensure our own welfare.”

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Leadership and sustainability scholar Rebecca Henderson, the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard Business School, reported hopeful signs from the business community. “We’re seeing firms really beginning to change,” she said. However, industry continues to look for policy to lead the way. “One of the two major political parties in the U.S. still has not accepted the reality of climate change.” With the Democrats’ slim majority in the House at risk, she said, “If you’re a business, you don’t want to alienate the political party that might be regulating you soon.”

To make progress, the panel agreed, developed countries need to take the lead. James H. Stock, Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy and a member of the Harvard Kennedy School faculty, urged a three-pronged approach. “Get the power sector on board for a deep de-carbonization,” urged Stock, suggesting a series of policy initiatives, such as carbon taxes. He also proposed a push to build more charging stations and other infrastructure to help speed the transition to electric vehicles. Finally, he cited the need to develop more green technologies to deal with tougher challenges. “We don’t know what to do about steel, about cement,” he said. The production of these ubiquitous building products is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Leaning also brought up the economic realities of addressing climate change on a global scale, stressing that less-developed countries need viable options. “You need some kind of fuel or stove that can be more green,” she said. “For the jitney bus, that is the way to get to market to be electric.”

“What the developed countries need to do is make it easy and cheap for the rest of the world to be green,” agreed Stock. Business, said Henderson, would follow. “We need to build a stronger collective sense that it is in our interests. Building the political will is as important as the policy.”

Ultimately, the panelists agreed, there are reasons to hope. Leaning referred to Mediterranean and European movements to create a “rescue service” for the many economic migrants who risk their lives at sea. “We’re seeing a collective action around the Mediterranean that is essentially a humane one as well as a legal one,” she said.

Henderson sees a larger role for industry: “Having the great corporations talk about climate change is a help,” she said. “People trust their own company. To have your firm say, ‘We have to change the lightbulbs; we need to change the supply chain’ will help.”

Stock, who worked in the Obama administration, applauded the goals of the new Biden administration but found more optimism in “the youth movement.” He called actions by Greta Thunberg and the Sunrise Movement “transformative.”

“We’re going to see great things happen,” he said.

UK
Asda workers’ equal pay victory: what does Supreme Court ruling mean?

Judges have ruled that thousands of shop-floor staff can compare their jobs to those of warehouse workers who are paid more, but there is a long way to go in this £8bn battle

Ben Chapman@b_c_chapman

3/26/2021


Asda could face a multi-million pound bill if the claimants are successful in the end
(PA)

A Supreme Court judgment stating that Asda store workers can compare their jobs to staff in depots is a boost for thousands of other retail workers pursuing claims for equal pay, the majority of them women.

Lawyers described the decision as “monumental” but it is far from the end of Asda staff’s legal battle, which has already gone on for five years.

What did the Supreme Court say?

Judges in the UK’s highest court upheld the 2016 decision of an employment tribunal that was also upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2019.

The judges said that work in Asda’s supermarkets was comparable to work in its depots.

Read more

Asda workers win landmark Supreme Court decision in latest round of £500m equal pay claim

Asda equal pay case: The landmark legal battle that could stop women in the UK being paid less than men

Why is this significant?

The ruling means that more than 40,000 shop-floor workers can proceed with their claim to be compensated for what they argue are years of underpayment compared with mostly male colleagues in Asda’s warehouses. The decision will be encouraging for thousands of other retail workers pursuing similar claims.

What's next?

Claims for equal pay can be complex and have several stages. While it is relatively simple to assess whether an employer has discriminated by paying a woman less than a man for the same job, it is trickier when the jobs are different.

The Asda claimants have completed the first step by showing that their jobs can be compared.

Friday's judgment did not look at the next stage: whether the two sets of jobs are of equal value.

This next part of the process is technical. An employment tribunal will look at a range of factors, including the skills necessary to do the job, the effort involved and the decision-making required.

Tribunals have decided in the past that work done by clerical assistants was of equal value to work done by warehouse operatives, and that canteen staff’s work was equal to that of surface mineworkers.

The decisions are specific to the circumstances and do not necessarily apply across different organisations.

If the claimants are able to show that their work is of equal value, then a tribunal would need to decide whether there was any reason, other than gender, for the discrepancy in pay.

If no such reason were found, the claimants would win their case, but Asda would be able to appeal. Only when all avenues for appeal were exhausted, and if the decision were upheld, would the workers be entitled to claim backdated pay.

How much money is involved?

Shop workers have been paid between £1.50 and £3 an hour less than their colleagues in the depots.

The law firm Leigh Day, which is representing the workers, estimates that Asda may have to shell out as much as £500m for backdated pay.

Leigh Day has other cases on behalf of current and former workers at Sainsbury's, Next, Co-op, Morrisons and Tesco, which it thinks could result in £8bn in backdated pay.

The Supreme Court's decision will also embolden claimants against other retailers, says Neha Thethi, head of employment at Lime Solicitors.

"Such mass actions for equal pay may well increase. The introduction of gender pay reporting means more information on gender pay is available, with the inevitable result that this issue is only likely to pick up steam.”

What was Asda's reaction?

Asda appeared ready to fight the case to the end.

A spokesperson said: “This ruling relates to one stage of a complex case that is likely to take several years to reach a conclusion.

“We are defending these claims because the pay in our stores and distribution centres is the same for colleagues doing the same jobs regardless of their gender.

“Retail and distribution are very different sectors with their own distinct skill sets and pay rates. Asda has always paid colleagues the market rate in these sectors and we remain confident in our case.”

Satellite image reveals true extent of the traffic jam caused by mega-ship lodged in the Suez Canal - as shipping firms call on US Navy for help amid fears cargo vessels are sitting ducks for PIRATES

Container ship Ever Given remains lodged in the Suez Canal, causing a traffic jam spanning two continents

 
Satellite image reveals extent of the jam in the Red Sea, with 50 boats seen at anchor in the Gulf of Suez

Some 250 vessels are now caught in the backlog, as workers desperately try to dig the Ever Given free

 
The only alternative is to sail around Africa, but shipping firms have warned that could make cargo vessels sitting ducks for pirates and have been asking the US Navy to advise on the security situation

By CHRIS PLEASANCE and JACK ELSOM FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 3/26/2021

VIDEOS AT THE END

A satellite image taken above the Red Sea have revealed the true extent of the traffic jam building up behind the cargo ship that has lodged itself in the Suez Canal.

Some 250 vessels are now backed up at either end of the narrow waterway, waiting for the stricken Ever Given - a container ship as long as the Empire State Building is tall - to be moved so they can pass.

Images taken by a passing satellite show more than 50 vessels at anchor in the Gulf of Suez, one of two 'fingers' at the northern end of the Red Sea, where it enters the canal which leads to the Mediterranean

In the top left-hand corner of the image the Ever Given can be seen, wedged diagonally across the channel in much the same position where it got stuck three days ago after the captain lost control during a sandstorm.

Shipping companies are now facing up to the stark reality that they may have to re-route their vessels around Africa with at least one - the Hyundai Prestige - already diverted around the longer route.

But that has brought security concerns, with captains of the vessels - laden with billions of dollars-worth of cargo - fearing they will be sitting ducks for pirates, particularly in waters off east Africa where they are known to operate.

The US Navy's Fifth Fleet, which operates in the Red Sea, say a number of shipping companies have reached out to them in the last two days about security in the region amid fears they could be attacked.

Zhao Qing-feng, office manager of the China Shipowners' Association in Shanghai, told the Financial Times that vessels choosing to go the African route will have to take on additional security staff to ensure they are safe.

Meanwhile Willy Lin, chair of the Hong Kong Shippers' Council, said an international coalition of naval warships might have to be brought in to protect cargo vessels if the crisis drags out.

Joshua Hutchinson, general manager ARX Mouldings, a UK-based maritime security consultancy, told The Independent that the ships are 'sitting ducks' - even in their current position.

There is still no indication of how long it might take to free the stricken tanker as workers try to dig up to 52ft below the vessel using excavators and dredgers in an attempt to refloat it.

Shoei Kisen, the Japanese owner of the Ever Given, optimistically predicted today that the ship will be freed from the canal tomorrow during high tide - despite a team of Dutch experts brought in to assist the rescue saying the operation could take 'weeks' and canal authorities refusing to give a time-frame.

A satellite image taken above the Gulf of Suez where it leads into the Suez Canal (top left) shows at least 50 large ships at anchor (right) as they wait for a stricken container ship to be freed from where it has lodged in the narrow waterway

Another satellite image reveals how a suction dredging ship has been brought in to work at the front of the vessel removing sand and mud from around the bow (left) in an attempt to free it

It is hoped that an especially high tide late Saturday will provide the best chance yet of refloating the vessel - with another two weeks until a similar tide returns

Canal workers have today resumed their efforts to free the stranded Ever Given, using dredgers and diggers to burrow some 52ft down into the banks of the canal in an attempt to refloat her
MarineTraffic track cargo ship build up around Suez canal

Another image, taken by a Russian satellite, exposes the scale of the engineering challenge posed by the stuck Ever Given, which is easily visible (left) even when compared to neighbouring towns

A suction dredger is moved into position at the front of the Ever Given where it will attempt to remove sand from around the bow of the ship so it can be refloated

Workers are aiming to burrow down up to 52ft below the waterline it the hopes that it will shift the Ever Given off the sand banks and cause it to float, so it can be backed out of the canal

Day two: Ever Green cargo ship remains aground in Suez 

If efforts to refloat the boat fail, then workers will have no choice but to bring in specialist cranes and start offloading cargo stacked more than 100ft tall on its deck in order to lessen the ship's weight.

The extent of the disruption was also revealed in data collected by monitoring site Marine Traffic, which showed how vessels were flowing normally until the ship got stuck - at which point traffic began building up at either end of the canal.

Shares in shipping companies surged off the back of the news, amid a rush to book slots aboard vessels not caught up in the Suez that will drive prices up.

Meanwhile it was confirmed that 25 crew members on board the vessel at the time it crashed, including the captain, are Indian. None are believed to have been hurt during the accident.

Russia has also used the crisis to call for an expansion of the so-called Arctic Passage which is increasingly passable due to climate change, saying it is time 'to develop alternatives to the Suez Canal'.

With each passing day, the crisis threatens disruptions to global trade already hit by the Covid pandemic - with Downing Street warning of delays in getting goods such as electronics, toys and clothes to the UK.

The crisis will also add strain to global supply chains already stretched by rebounding economic activity and tight shipping container supplies, analysts said on Friday.

The blockage comes as shipments have already been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic and a surge in demand for goods.

Roughly 30 per cent of global container traffic flows through the canal annually. The severed trade route could affect about 10 to 15 per cent of world container throughput while the blockage persists, analysts from Moody's Investors Service said.

'Very high consumer and industrial demand, a global shortage of container capacity and low service reliability from global container shipping companies... has made supply chains highly vulnerable to even the smallest of external shocks,' they said in a note on Friday

'In that context, the timing of this event could not have been worse.'

Vessel utilisation has been at full capacity on the Asia-Europe trade route because of heavy demand from European importers, with terminals in Europe experiencing labour shortages due to coronavirus-related measures, said Greg Knowler from consultancy IHS Markit.

China overtook the United States as Europe's top trade partner in 2020, underscoring Asia's critical ties to industry and consumers in Europe, which is also the top destination for China's exports outside Asia.

Delays in returning empty containers to Asian exporters will further exacerbate the current shortage of containers, the consultancy added in a note.

The Suez Canal is also a preferred route for U.S. importers of manufactured goods such as footwear and apparel from Southeast Asia and India, they added.

Ships will now have to potentially take the longer route around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, adding about 7-10 days to their journey, which will push up costs.

As a result, Europe's manufacturing industry and auto sector, including auto suppliers, will be hit hardest, Moody's Investors Service said.

'This is because they operate 'just-in-time' supply chains, meaning they do not stockpile parts and only have enough on hand for a short period, and source components from Asian manufacturers,' the analysts said.

'Even if the situation is resolved quickly, port congestion and further delays to an already constrained supply chain are inevitable.'

They added that alternative modes of transportation are not plausible, as air freight capacity is already tight due to less global air travel while rail transportation between China and Europe is limited and already nearing capacity.

The transport minister of Singapore, the world's top transhipment hub, said on Thursday the blockage in the Suez Canal could temporarily disrupt supplies to the region, and potentially cause a drawdown on inventories.

'My view is that this will cause problems for a lot of countries and industries around the world in the short run,' said Sumit Agarwal, economics professor at National University of Singapore.

 


Canal workers are attempting to dig out sand from around the bow of the ship which is embedded in the eastern wall of the canal, and may have to dig tens of feet to allow the ship to refloat. Meanwhile tugboats and dredgers are working at the rear of the vessel to free the stern against the western wall. If those efforts fail, specialist cranes will have to come in to help remove some of the cargo - with containers weighing up to 33 tons each

Experts brought in to help with the rescue say workers will have to remove up to 706,000 cubic feet of sand and mud from around the ship - roughly equivalent to eight Olympic swimming pools - to give the ship a chance of moving

The Mashhour, an Egyptian dredging vessel (right), is moved into position at the front end of the Ever Given (left) where it will attempt to suck out sand and mud from underneath

Tugboats are positioned at the rear of the vessel (front left) where they are attempting to shove the ship back into the canal in order to get it moving again

The canal provides the shortest possible route for ships travelling between Asia and Europe, with the only alternative being to sail around the Cape of Good Hope - adding 14 days and 5,000 nautical miles to the journey

Meanwhile Boris Johnson's spokesman said on Thursday that 'goods destined for the UK may be delayed in transit' but added that no company has yet approached the government with concerns.

However, analysts who spoke with MailOnline warned that a prolonged blockage of the canal could drive up the price of new cars by causing a shortage of computer chips, and cause shipping costs to spike - heaping pressure on Covid-hit businesses which could ultimately be passed to consumers as lockdowns ease.

Meanwhile, analysis of UK trade data exposes exports from Asia to Britain which are likely to be affected if the crisis drags on - with furniture, homewares, clothing and footwear among those which could be affected.

Seven out of the top 10 exporters of electrical goods to the UK are Asian countries making them a likely casualty, while almost half of the UK's furniture imports come from the same region.

China alone manufactures almost half the toys imported into Britain which are likely to pass through the canal, and accounts for a similar amount of homewares.

Simon Macadam, senior global economist at Capital Economics, told MailOnline that a delay of several weeks would drive up shipping rates - which are already at 'unprecedented' levels due to the Covid crisis - piling pressure on hard-hit businesses who would be expected to swallow the increased costs in the short-term.

However, he added that those costs could eventually be passed along to customers later in the year as Covid lockdowns ease and business owners try to recoup their losses.

The cost of renting some tankers for voyages from the Middle East to Asia has jumped 47 per cent over the last three days Anoop Singh, Singapore-based head of tanker analysis at Braemar ACM, told the Wall Street Journal.

Similar price hikes could hit Europe-bound routes as shipping firms run low on vessels with many stuck in the canal, while those which are free are forced to sail around Africa.

Avoiding the canal by sailing around Africa can add $450,000 in costs per voyage, Mr. Singh added.

Meanwhile Douglas McWilliams, deputy chairman of the Centre for Economics and Business Research, warned that a lengthy blockage is likely to cause a shortage of computer chips - with several weeks' worth of supplies thought to be caught up in the unfolding drama.

That could mean price hikes in products which use a lot of chips, potentially adding £70 to the price of a new car while having a knock-on effect on other electrical goods.

Oil markets were one of the first to react on Wednesday as the price of crude spiked 6 per cent, before falling back today as demand slumps amid the Covid pandemic.

Another analyst who spoke to MailOnline on condition of anonymity said an outage of two weeks or more could potentially cause shortages in stores as ships are routed around Africa, increasing their journey time by 14 days.

A source involved in the UK shipping trade added that it they are being warned it could take up to three weeks to clear the backlog of ships building up around the canal, even if the stricken ship is removed soon.

Kate Harding, chief executive of trade data firm Coriolis Technologies, warned that the risks to global trade are 'absolutely enormous'.

A longer-term issue, one analyst told MailOnline, is disruption to global shipping schedules that could drag on for weeks even after the canal is unblocked.

Ports typically run tight operations with strict time-slots for loading and unloading cargo to make sure containers don't pile up and to ensure a smooth supply of goods across the world.

But with ships piling up around the canal, whenever the waterway is unblocked it will cause a glut of vessels to arrive at ports all at once.

That will mean delays in getting ships unloaded and then re-loaded as there are only a limited number of specialist cranes that can deal with vessels of this size, knocking schedules out of whack.

There is still no indication of how long the ship make take to free, with Japanese owners Shoei Kisen KK saying it is still 'too early to tell'.

Mr Berdowski compared the ship to 'an enormous beached whale' and warned workers might have to start offloading cargo in order to reduce its weight and get it floating again.

'We can't exclude it might take weeks, depending on the situation,' he told Dutch media. 'It's an enormous weight on the sand. We might have to work with a combination of reducing the weight by removing containers, oil and water from the ship, tug boats and dredging of sand.'

Excavators are trying to dig out the vessel's dolphin-nose bow which has lodged in the eastern wall of the canal, while dredgers and tugboats try to shift its stern which is jammed against the western side.
Suez canal blockage: Marine Traffic compares ships congestion


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Satellite images taken today reveal the Ever Given - leased by shipping firm Evergreen - is still stranded in much the same position it was left on Tuesday after crashing

The Taiwan-owned MV Ever Given is pictured today still lodged sideways and impeding all traffic across the waterway

Tugboats positioned alongside the Ever Given hold it in position while workers attempt to dig the bow out of the canal wall

Ships are anchored outside the Suez Canal in Ismailia, Egypt, wait to be able to pass through the canal after it was blocked

\
Day two: Ships anchored as Suez canal continues to be blocked

Estimates of the value of cargo come from analytics firm Lloyd's List, which believes $5billion-worth of containers are sent westwards through the waterway each day. The value of eastbound traffic is slightly less, at $4.5billion.

The cargo makes up about 12 per cent of oceangoing trade each day, including around 10 per cent of oil and gas shipments.

As the backlog builds, costs for Ever Given's owners - Japanese firm Shoei Kisen KK - and their insurers will mount in what could turn out to be the world's most expensive traffic jam.

Industry experts warned the bill will likely total millions of dollars, even assuming the vessel can be moved quickly.

Insurers could find themselves on the hook for costs incurred by shipping firms whose routes are delayed, plus from Egyptian authorities which make almost $6billion each year charging companies for use of the canal.

The costs of the rescue operation will also fall on insurers, along with any damage the ship sustains while it is being salvaged, analysts said.

Attempting to head-off criticism, the ship's owners issued an apology today - saying they are 'extremely sorry' for the 'tremendous worry' that the accident has caused.

The firm said it is cooperating with its technical management company and the local authorities to get the ship afloat, but 'the operation is extremely difficult.'

'It is potentially the world's biggest ever container ship disaster without a ship going bang,' one shipping lawyer, who declined to be named, said.

Meanwhile Nick Sloane, a salvage master who helped refloat the Costa Concordia cruise ship after it ran aground off the coast of Italy, said rescuers' best chance of moving the vessel will come on Monday when tides will be at their highest point.

If that window is missed then it will take another two weeks for the opportunity to present itself again, he told Bloomberg. 'This is definitely not a quick refloat operation,' he added.

It is thought the accident happened after the ship's captain and two Egyptian pilots sent on board to help guide the vessel became blinded during a sandstorm with high winds that sent the vessel off course and caused it to get wedged around 7.45am on Tuesday.

While a gust of wind seems an unlikely culprit, it turns out that the Ever Given has past form of crashing during high winds, after being involved in an accident in the German port of Hamburg in 2019.

In February that year, the cargo ship was manoeuvering into port when a strong gust of wind pushed it off course and into a docked passenger ferry, Bild reports

The ferry, named Finkenwerder, was completely written off in the accident while three crew members were treated for shock - though thankfully there were no passengers on board.



A huge container ship blocking the Suez Canal is threatening to delay shipments to the UK, with electronics, clothes, furniture and toys all likely to be affected

 


Every daythe canal is blocked means 10 per cent of oceangoing trade cannot move as it should, with 50 ships being added to the massive traffic jam building up around the canal (pictured)
Suez canal blocked as 200,000-ton cargo ship Ever Given runs aground

Tracking data from Marine Traffic has revealed the extent of the jam, comparing a typical day last week with traffic yesterday, with ships piling up at either end of the waterway.

Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, the company that manages the Ever Given, said the ship's 25-member crew were safe and accounted for after the accident.

Cargo ships already behind the Ever Given in the canal will be reversed south back to Port Suez to free the channel, Leth Agencies said. Authorities hope to do the same to the Ever Given when they can free it.

Evergreen Marine Corp, a major Taiwan-based shipping company that operates the ship, said in a statement that the Ever Given had been overcome by strong winds as it entered the canal from the Red Sea. None of its containers had sunk.

An Egyptian official, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to brief journalists, similarly blamed a strong wind.

Egyptian forecasters said high winds and a sandstorm plagued the area on Tuesday, with winds gusting as high as 30 miles per hour.

An initial report suggested the ship suffered a power blackout before the incident, something Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement denied on Thursday.

'Initial investigations rule out any mechanical or engine failure as a cause of the grounding,' the company said.

Tuesday marked the second major crash involving the Ever Given in recent years.

In 2019, the cargo ship ran into a small ferry moored on the Elbe River in the German port city of Hamburg. Authorities at the time blamed strong wind for the collision, which severely damaged the ferry.

The closure could affect oil and gas shipments to Europe from the Mideast, which rely on the canal to avoid sailing around Africa. The price of international benchmark Brent crude stood at more than 63 dollars a barrel on Thursday.

The Ever Given, built in 2018 with a length of nearly 400 meters, or a quarter of a mile, and a width of 193 feet, is among the largest cargo ships in the world.

It can carry some 20,000 containers at a time. It previously had been at ports in China before heading toward Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

Opened in 1869, the Suez Canal provides a crucial link for oil, natural gas and cargo. It also remains one of Egypt's top foreign currency earners.

In 2015, the government of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi completed a major expansion of the canal, allowing it to accommodate the world's largest vessels.

However, the Ever Given ran aground south of that new portion of the canal.

This stranding marks just the latest setback to affect mariners amid the Covid crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people having been stuck aboard vessels due to the pandemic.

Why is the Suez Canal so important?

The Suez canal, which is around 120 miles long links the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean and is the shortest shipping route between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.

Before the canal, shipping from Europe either had to go overland or risk going around Cape Horn and the South Atlantic.

In April 1859, construction of the canal officially begins, much of the work financed by France.

It was opened for navigation on November 17, 1869 for vessels from all countries, although the British government later wanted to have an armed force in the area to protect shipping interests having picked up a 44 per cent stake in the canal in 1875.


The Suez Canal links the Red Sea and the Mediterranean providing a short cut from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic

From then, while nominally owned by Egypt, the canal was run by Britain and France until its until its nationalisation in 1956 .

The nationalisation by Nasser saw Britain and France launched an abortive and humiliating bid to recapture the vital waterway.

The canal was shut briefly following the attempted invasion.

However, in 1967 the canal was shut for eight years following the Six Day war with Israel.

Due to the instability in the region, the canal remained closed until 1975 - its longest ever closure, as the waterway had been mined and some vessels had been sunk in the main channel.

The Suez Canal is actually the first canal that directly links the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea.

In 2015 a new section of the canal opened, allowing vessels to traverse the waterway in both directions at the same time.

Future plans will see the two-lane system extended across the entire network- doubling current capacity of the canal.

The largest cargo vessels pay more than £180,000 in tolls to traverse the canal.

On average about 40-50 cargo vessels use the canal on a daily basis in a trip that takes around 11 hours, as speed along the waterway is limited to about 9kts to prevent the banks of the canal getting washed away.

Along the canal there are emergency mooring slots so vessels can pull over if they are suffering a mechanical issue.

When the canal first opened, the channel was approximately 26 feet deep and 72 feet wide at the bottom. The surface was between 200 and 300 feet wide to allow ships to pass.

By the 1960s, dredging of the canal increased the depth to 40 feet and widened the waterway to allow larger vessels.

Now, the minimum depth of the canal is 66feet, though this is been increased to 72 feet - allowing even larger vessels.

What was the Suez Crisis


The 1956 Suez Crisis was prompted by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser who decided to nationalise the Suez Canal, which had been controlled for around a century by France and Britain.

Israel used the instability to invade Egypt and move towards the strategically important canal.

Britain and France sent troops to recapture the canal - claiming they wanted to return stability to the region - but in reality they wanted to force the collapse of Nasser's government and regain strategic control of the waterway.


The humiliation of the Suez crisis prompted Prime Minister Anthony Eden, pictured here in 1955 to resign after Britain was forced to withdraw from Egypt having lost the support of the United States

However, the United States refused to back Britain and France's action, forcing them to withdraw after the Egyptians were backed by the Soviet Union.

America threatened economic sanctions against Britain, France and Israel, forcing their withdrawal and their replacement by UN peacekeepers.

The humiliation prompted the resignation of British Prime Minister Anthony Eden

Read more:
Egypt's Suez Canal blocked by large container ship - BBC News
MarineTraffic: Global Ship Tracking Intelligence | AIS Marine Traffic
Suezkanal blockiert von Containerschiff ¿ 2019 rammte ¿Ever Given¿ schon eine Elbfähre - News Inland - Bild.de
Subscribe to read | Financial Times
MarineTraffic: Global Ship Tracking Intelligence | AIS Marine Traffic

    

‘Sitting ducks’: How the Suez Canal calamity could get even worse

‘Every day there’s another backlog, these ships are sitting there at risk’

Borzou Daragahi
International Correspondent@borzou
3/26/2021

Going nowhere: Stranded container ship Ever Given
(Reuters)


There is a technical term for the 250 or so tankers loaded with billions of dollars worth of goods stuck on either side of Egypt’s Suez Canal in one of the most politically volatile and unstable regions of the world.

“We would call them sitting ducks,” said Joshua Hutchinson, general manager ARX Mouldings, a UK-based maritime security consultancy.


The quarter-mile long MV Ever Given container ship that ran aground on Tuesday within the Suez Canal has held up billions of dollars worth of global commerce and has already driven up the price of oil, potentially hampering recovery of a world economy already battered by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

On Thursday, Egypt suspended all navigation within the canal as engineering teams from the Netherlands and Japan sought a way to dislodge the gigantic container ship and clear the waterway.


But security experts are also worried about the potential for piracy, politically motivated sabotage, or even more mishaps as scores of massive freight ships remain stuck in two of the most volatile regions on the planet: the eastern Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa.


Read more:

Everything we know about the ship grounded in the Suez Canal

Suez canal news live: Shipping lane blocked by Ever Given vessel

A brief history of the Suez Canal

Log on to any marine traffic monitoring website and you can see icons representing vessels on either side of the canal, in the Red Sea at the southern edge of the Canal or off the coast of Port Said to the north. Further off in the seas more ships slow down, contemplating the roadblock up ahead, and perhaps reconsidering the far lengthier route through open waters around the southern tip of Africa.


“Every day there’s another backlog, these ships are sitting there at risk,” said Mr Hutchinson. “It’s the largest traffic jam the world is about to see. If you’re a static ship, you’re obviously facing a clear threat.”

Any incident could have an impact on the fragile global economy. Rates for transporting containers between Asia and Europe have risen dramatically over the past year. An attack of any type could raise costs further by increasing insurance rates, escalating prices for everything from petroleum to iPhones.
Container ships waiting outside the Suez Canal
(Reuters)

Turned off by the threat of piracy off the coast of Somalia and buoyed by lower energy prices, many transport firms in recent years have opted to forgo the Suez Canal bottleneck and sail the far longer route around the Cape of Good Hope in moving goods between Europe and Asia.

Indeed, maritime security analysts say ships now heading from Asia toward Europe are already moving to avoid the Gulf of Aden that leads to the Suez Canal and rerouting southward.

Around 12 per cent of global goods aboard 19,000 ships per year or around 50 per day transit through the 120-mile Suez Canal, which was built in 1869 and last expanded in 2015.

To get through, vessels must pass Mediterranean Sea waters where Greece, Turkey and Israel jostle for dominance on one end, and the Red Sea and Arabian Sea on the other, where Iran, Arabian Peninsula powers as well as armed groups and pirates maintain a presence. Along the way, wars and insurgencies rage in Libya, Eritrea, Yemen and Somalia.

Underscoring the dangers to shipping in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean, an Israeli-owned ship was struck Thursday by a rocket in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Oman, the second Israeli ship that has been attacked in a month in what security analysts suspect is part of a tit-for-tat acts of sabotage between Iran and Israel.

The biggest fear of any vessel is remaining static. That’s going to start raising huge concerns for these shipping companies

“There’s really an opportunity. There are some high-value targets and we’re not just talking about container ships, but cargo,” said Mr Hutchinson. “The biggest fear of any vessel is remaining static. That’s going to start raising huge concerns for these shipping companies.”

Adding to the perils, piracy incidents spiked from 162 to 195 worldwide in 2020 compared to the previous year, according to the International Maritime Bureau, though the focus of attacks has shifted from east Africa where it was centred a decade ago to west Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America. Politically motivated attacks on both sides of the Suez are a graver concern.

“Piracy is not an issue in that part of that world; terrorism is probably the biggest threat,” said Chris Long, intelligence director for Neptune P2P, a security consultancy focused on maritime safety.

“It’s unlikely that anything is going to happen. But it’s an opportunity. The ships are anchored up and there’s a glut of targets.”

Mr Hutchinson warned that further accidents were another potential calamity.
A satellite image shows stranded container ship Ever Given
(CNES/Airbus DS via Reuters)

He speculated that a year of grinding work amid the pandemic might have made the crew of the Japanese-owned, Taiwanese-operated and Liberian-flagged Ever Given exhausted, contributing to the possible human errors that led to the grounding of the ship and the blockage of the canal in what maritime experts are calling a “worst-case scenario”.

Exhausted sailors who have not seen their families for months-long stretches are bound to make mistakes. On the same day that the Ever Given ran aground, a Russian military tanker collided with a container ship just north of the Suez Canal’s entrance.

“We’ve got crews who haven’t been off vessels for 12 months,” said Mr Hutchinson. “The shopping industry has continued shipping around the world. It hasn’t stopped. You’ve got some very tired operators.”

Delay on Suez Canal could cripple already struggling auto industry

“Any slight delay in delivery could mean the production lines in Europe will grind to a halt,” said one auto industry expert.

A worker inspects a new car in an assembly plant of Dongfeng Honda,

 in Wuhan, China, on Sept. 3, 2020.Barcroft Media / via Getty Images file

March 26, 2021, 
By Paul A. Eisenstein

The blockage in the Suez Canal is straining an already struggling automotive industry, and further delays could create shortages in the U.S. market, if the massive Ever Given container ship cannot soon be refloated.

That would complicate matters for an industry troubled by shortages of semiconductors, as well as seating foam and other petroleum-based materials.


“It only takes a shortage of one part to mess things up,” said Kristen Dziczek, vice president of research for the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The auto industry depends heavily upon the canal, which facilitates the move of raw materials, parts and finished vehicles. As of Friday morning, Europe’s Car Dealer magazine reported at least two large auto transport vessels, the Morning Star and the Hoegh London, were blocked by the grounding of the Ever Given. It said several other vessels are heading towards the Suez and could either be forced to anchor if the crisis isn’t resolved, or to divert. Taking the long way around Africa adds about 10 days to a typical freighter’s time at sea.

With the price of oil spiking due to the trade blockage, the White House said Friday that the U.S. has made an offer of help to the Egyptian authorities.

“We are tracking the situation very closely,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. “We do see some potential impacts on energy markets from the role of the Suez Canal as a key bidirectional transit route for oil, and obviously that’s one of the reasons we offered assistance."

“We’re going to continue to monitor market conditions and we will respond appropriately if necessary, but it is something we’re watching closely,” Psaki said.

The auto industry is particularly vulnerable right now. Factories around the world closed for months last year due to the coronavirus pandemic and retail inventories are at low levels not seen in decades. In the U.S., for example, J.D. Power estimates there are about 1 million fewer vehicles on dealer lots than is normal this time of year.

Manufacturers have been struggling to rebuild inventories but have faced a variety of challenges, including worsening shortages of the semiconductors now an essential part of every new vehicle. That has forced automakers to close or slow production at scores of assembly lines in recent weeks. And now, there have been reported shortages of petroleum-based goods, such as seating foams.


Even a slight disruption in the supply chain can compound problems in an industry that operates on a "just-in-time" basis.

Even a slight disruption in the supply chain can compound such problems in an industry that operates on a just-in-time basis, with factories maintaining as little inventory as possible,

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“Any slight delay in delivery could mean the production lines in Europe will grind to a halt,” said Tom Barnard, editor of Electrifying.com.

While the shutdown of the Suez Canal poses the most severe problems for automotive trade between Europe and the Far East, the American industry is still at risk, Dziczek said.

It could lead to shortages at U.S. dealerships of European vehicle imports, products from manufacturers such as Volkswagen, Volvo, BMW or Mercedes-Benz, if their plants are forced to shut down. And American assembly lines could face shortages of European-made parts and components, such as a Bosch electronic stability control system.

The crisis is further compounded by shipping problems in the U.S., including a slowdown at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, said Michelle Krebs, principal automotive analyst for Cox Automotive.

“All these things add up,” she told NBC News.

"At present, it is still too early to estimate” the impact of the Ever Given’s grounding, German supplier BASF said in a statement.

But the longer it takes to refloat the skyscraper-sized cargo carrier, the more likely it will be for the global auto industry to face serious disruptions.