Ninety Percent Of Everything, George - B

                                          The title refers to the percentage of the things in our everyday life that come from somewhere else (usually Asia) and are shipped to us on large cargo ships. Our clothes, our shoes, our cars, certainly our electronics, even much of our food is not from the US or, in the case of this author, the UK.  The vast majority of the things we see and touch daily come from somewhere else in our highly globalized world. The reason is simple - it's more cost effective.  My favorite example in the book is Scottish cod. It is actually frozen and shipped to China, where it is filleted, before returning to grocer's shelves in Edinburgh or Glasgow. Trade volume on the oceans has increased fourfold in the last four decades. The value of goods unloaded at American docks has gone up eighty-fold in the last fifty years.  Of the 100,000 cargo ships at sea, it is the 6000 container vessels that do the heavy lifting.  The largest ships can carry 15,000 boxes.  The boxes are called teu's for twenty-foot equivalent units, are transferable to trains and trucks, and have revolutionized the industry.  They can't be opened, thus eliminating 'spillage' and can be moved with much less manpower than old-fashioned cargo.
                                        The author shipped out on a Maersk container ship from England to Singapore, a five week journey of over 6200 nautical miles. One of the points that she hammers home is the plight of the average seaman and the lawlessness of international waters. The Filipinos and Indians, because of their facility with English, are the most desired workers.  They are hired by manning agencies and assigned to ships, usually with a flag of convenience, an owner hidden behind shell company after holding company etc., and managed by someone from somewhere else. As a consequence, there is no country's law that applies to how they are treated while working, cared for if held hostage, or investigated if drowned. A flag of convenience is just that.  Pay Panama some money for their flag and don't worry about anything else.  Piracy, in the headlines and in the movies, is rampant off Somalia and markedly reduced in the Straits of Malacca.  The recession led to much lengthier periods of imprisonment for hostages for a fundamental economic reason: the lease costs for the ships was down so much from the heights of the boom that the operators preferred to wait out the pirates before agreeing to the ransom.  Some of the other fascinating statistics that popped up were: the port of Rotterdam is forty-miles long; sadly, there are 2,000 deaths per year at sea; and the sludge diesel they use has 45,000 ppm (particulates per million), compared to under a 100 for the clean diesel used in todays automobiles (shipped from Germany).