- Unscrupulous cargo ship owners can abandon whole crews at sea if they run into money troubles.
- One crew, stranded off the coast of Mombasa, Kenya, has been trapped at sea for 18 months.
- The plight of the Ever Given focused attention on seafarers’ wellbeing in an often-shady industry.
A Yahoo News report by Mia Jankowicz says that cargo ship owners can disappear and leave their crews unpaid and starving. 10 mariners have been stranded off Kenya for 18 months.
Off the coast of Kenya, near Mombasa, sits the MV Jinan, laden with steel. The cargo ship has not moved for 18 months and neither has its 10 crew.
In October 2019, the Jinan’s owner abandoned the ship, leaving the crew without pay or any means of subsistence. The crew, all from Syria, cannot enter Kenya without a visa, and are more than 6,000 miles from home.
They have spent the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic stuck, with little contact from the outside world.
The Jinan cargo ship
Abandonment is defined by the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) as when an owner cuts ties with the ship, or otherwise fails to pay a crew’s salary or get them home.
The complex process of dealing with cases has improved. But while the legal wrangles play out, the crew – and particularly the captain, who is often made the legal guardian of the vessel – can be effectively imprisoned on abandoned vessels.
As the pandemic strained global trade, reports of abandonment hit record highs. When the International Maritime Organization (IMO)’s formal database first began in 2004, there were 20 to 30 cases a year, Natasha Brown, the IMO’s head of public information, told Insider.
Data received in 2020
In 2020, 76 new cases were recorded, the famed shipping journal Lloyd’s List reported, and as of May there had been 26 in 2021.
There is a substantial human toll when a ship is abandoned.
The main human contact the crew of the Jinan has had since abandonment is Rev. Moses Muli, who works with the Christian welfare charity the Mission to Seafarers in Mombasa.
“For the crew, the situation is really bad,” he told Insider. “The situation is worse than being in jail.”
Thanks to protracted negotiations, the Jinan’s crew are due to soon receive $309,290 collectively owed in back pay, and, according to Muli, should be able to leave their ship soon. The Jinan is to be sold for scrap.
Most of them were almost giving up
The MV Jinan reached Mombasa in September 2019, and the crew were told to stay put and await orders. A couple of weeks in, it dawned on them that nothing more would come.
In many places, the port authority has welfare offices that can help with abandonment, which is generally reported by the IMO or the ITF.
But in Mombasa, Muli’s office with the Mission to Seafarers was the Jinan’s main source of support.
“We thought it was going to be a short-term problem, but it has taken longer than we expected,” Muli told Insider. “So since then, we have been supporting the ship up to now.”
Many cases are resolved within a matter of two or three months, but the Jinan’s struggles stretched out. Over the months, seven of the 17-strong crew gave up. Their families pulled together the cost of air fare home, and they left, Muli said.
Ten remaining crew members waited it out.
It is an uncomfortable existence. The ship is a plain environment with small living quarters and little by way of human comforts.
Muli, the lifeline
Muli has been a lifeline. He speaks to the captain over the phone almost daily, and makes the 1km trip from the shore out to the Jinan at least once a week, bringing food supplies and other essentials.
“They are like my family,” Muli said.
The supplies are basic, and luxuries are rare. “In most cases, the captain sends us a list of the items he needs,” Muli said – which are usually food like potatoes, wheat, rice and meat, and essentials like generator fuel, cooking gas, and first aid supplies.
The crew are celebrating Ramadan – a festival marked by a daylight fast that is ideally broken with large, convivial meals with family after the sun has gone down.
There’s no such luxury for the crew of the Jinan, however, whose treat will be fruit, “if we have the funds,” said Muli.
So far, the crew’s upkeep has cost some 1.3 million Kenyan shillings, around $12,000. When the Mombasa branch of the Mission to Seafarers’ local funds ran out, the charity’s international headquarters stepped in with further support.
The crew have also received donations from outside, including from a grassroots organization called Who Is Hussain, and the Catholic Church in Mombasa.
A growing problem
It’s unclear exactly how many cargo ships – or how many crew – are currently abandoned, according to Brown, the IMO official.
As of late April the IMO database listed 198 vessels – mostly cargo ships and some fishing vessels – as part of open or disputed abandonment cases, some dating back to 2005. In some instances the crew made it home but never received their full pay. In others, mariners are still on board, hoping for a breakthrough.
A cursory look through the cases shows many claims of abuse: allegations of stolen passports; being left without food, water, or fuel; crew left stranded long after the expiration of their contracts; filthy living conditions; ships changing the national flag under which they sail in apparent attempts to escape regulation.
Invisible workers
There is no simple explanation for the steep increase in reported cases of abandonment, Brown said, but the pandemic has likely made it worse.
In 2017, amendments to the 2006 Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) came into force, making it mandatory for shipping companies to insure against abandonment.
This provided a clearer legal pathway to file lawsuits – likely accounting for the increase in reports, to 55, that came in that year, Brown said. But between then and the pandemic, reports had been on the decline.
Noting the 26 reports already made in 2021, Brown said: “This is a worrying trend and what we have to ask is, is it to do with the economic impact of COVID-19 on small shipping companies?”
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Source: Yahoo News
