Deep Waters: The hidden world of global shipping
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 28 March 2023
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Bulk carriers are the ships that keep the modern world going - like the MV Raeda and the MV Olivian Confidence carrying grain from Ukraine to Turkey, and flour to Afghanistan and Yemen. Zig zagging across the oceans for months at a time, bulk carriers keep us all going even in times of war and pandemic. ‘If it didn’t grow in your garden,’ says broker Aysu Gurgan, ‘A bulk carrier brought it to you.’ Steel, sand, coal, cement - the very fabric of the modern world - all of it reaches us on bulkers. Unseen by the very populations that rely on them, each bulker is also a home to international crews who spend half their lives on board.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's one of the world. |
| 0:11.6 | It's one of the world's oldest, most vital, most taken for granted industries. |
| 0:17.7 | Without ships, 90% of everything we use or consume would never reach us. Through wars, |
| 0:24.6 | plagues and storms, the world's 100,000 cargo vessels sail on, grain and steel carriers, |
| 0:33.0 | oil tankers, container ships, dependent on the 1.7 million seafarers who crew them, and on layers of |
| 0:41.1 | unseen networks that also keep them afloat. Charterers, brokers, insurers, chandlers. |
| 0:48.8 | It's a world that's eternal and yet continually changing, visible to all on the surface, |
| 0:55.6 | and yet deeply opaque underneath. |
| 0:59.7 | I'm Tim Hewell here on the BBC World Service, |
| 1:03.2 | and this is part one of deep waters, |
| 1:06.3 | the hidden world of global shipping. |
| 1:13.0 | It's immediately in front of me |
| 1:14.7 | here on the breakwater in the port of Samson |
| 1:17.8 | in northern Turkey on the Black Sea coast of Turkey |
| 1:20.4 | is a huge grain carrier. |
| 1:23.6 | It's got a black hole, white cabins above |
| 1:26.9 | and towering over it is a sky-blue crane. |
| 1:32.0 | Everything here, I should say, is in winter sunshine. |
| 1:35.3 | Everything is in bright, primary colours. |
| 1:38.7 | Lorries are coming onto the breakwater. |
| 1:41.5 | They each have two rows of huge plastic sacks of flour, almost as tall |
| 1:48.9 | as a person, 30 of these on each truck, and the crane is lowering down a bright orange steel bar |
... |
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