Sadly, like him, I was unable to come up with anything concrete other than agreeing that a new strategy is needed.

Whether that should be – as Intertanko has advocated – a change in the rules of engagement I’m not sure, but I think that just like the issue of employing armed guards onboard ship, it risks increasing the body count in the short term while failing to provide that long term vision of a Gulf of Aden without pirates.

But a recent article in The Economist on the International Criminal Court in Africa  set me thinking, or rather recalling a conversation with Peter Hinchliffe of the International Chamber of Shipping at the recent IMO MSC meeting.

Hinchliffe confessed himself exasperated beyond measure with the situation, expressed through his organisation’s strategy of reminding the industry that Somali piracy is not ‘situation normal’.

What Hinchliffe advocated was an arrangement with the ICC to open a court for pirates and bring them to trial. This would be a lower court than the war crimes/genocide mandate that the ICC was set up for, but could still provide some efficient processing of pirates for trial and incarceration of the guilty.

There would be issues with this still – not least the likely media backlash about transporting pirates to Europe for trial, a location they are likely to see as a better bet than the streets of Xaradheere. What happens to them if acquitted and after the sentence is served, must all be decided.

But without punishment, there can be no deterrence and if Intertanko, ICS, BIMCO et al want to do something about piracy, they may have to admit that the game in the Gulf cannot be won so long as they cannot bring the weight of international institutions to bear.

Hinchliffe further remarked that although the IMO process continues in parallel with the UN, the chance for real change lies as much with the UN Contact Group as it does with MSC.

And as he glumly but accurately observed, pirates seem to make very good risk managers. Faced with the naval presence they have adapted, sailing further afield and employing motherships in the worst of weathers if they feel there is a prize for the taking.

This is a stark truth and one I doubt will endear me to the letter writers but it suggests that shipping could try and learn from the pirates about new strategies. Because if a global, highly efficient industry cannot either mobilise government support for its position or generate an innovative solution, then this situation will never end.

The Economist article attempted to cast the ICC not as an post-imperialist body but rather a partner for African nations keen to establish legal legitimacy and bring the most obvious criminals to trial. With Somalia in pieces, the ICC will not be opening an office there any time soon, but its neighbours should listen to Hinchliffe’s ideas and start trying to get the western economies – so dependent on cargo through Suez, to take a bigger stake in solving the problem of piracy by legal means.

The Daily Mail, staunch defender of British middle class ‘values’ is the latest copy-chaser to corral howling inaccuracies, huge suppositions and massive conjecture and present them as facts  in a one-sided ‘shipping is evil’ argument.

The Mail even found its own ‘expert’ – an environmental consultant to New Scientist no less – to claim that 16 ships “can produce as much lung-clogging sulphur pollution as all the world’s cars”. He bases this on the revelation that there are 54 tankers lying off the English coast – part floating storage, part arbitrage, though whether the other 38 emit any sulphur is unclear from the story.

Indeed, whether his sums: a nominal 16 of “the largest ships emitting 5,000 tonnes of sulphur a year” equivalent to “50 million cars emitting 100 grams of sulphur per year” multiplied up “a world fleet of 800 cars” are either accurate or meaningful is almost beside the point.

We have all seen versions of this PowerPoint and pointed out that it ignores tonne miles as well as the clean air regulation that forced the cleanup of car exhausts. The bizarre claims continued, citing Corbett and Winebrake’s ’60,000 deaths per annum’ study (scholarly but containing a enormous caveats) and some of the usual suspects who crop up when there’s a cheap quote and free publicity to be garnered, parlaying a weak story into a pre-Copenhagen pot-boiler.

But the real disappointment in all this? That the organisation best placed to tear a strip off this slapdash one-sided nonsense was only able to complain to the Mail that the article “portrayed shipping a bit unfairly”. The ICS, for it is they, did manage to lob in some balancing comments in a circular email to challenge some of the claims but by then, the damage had been done.

And really, shipping is going to have to do a lot better than this. This is not to single out or bash the ICS. But if a well-funded organisation, packed with experts and presumably retaining PR talent, cannot get a balancing article in a newspaper so obviously hungry for copy, then we should all be very afraid.

And why did the UK industry not join in condemnation en masse, leaving web comments, tweeting, blogging and writing letters of complaint? In this debate – and particularly post-Copenhagen – that is precisely what shipping’s opponents will do.  Its proponents need to do better.