BBC Box abandoned, broken up on Bengali beach

By Ryan Skinner (email)

What began as a visionary media stunt to demonstrate the complexity of global trade has ended on the rusty steel-strewn shores of India. After it became lost some time in the second-half of 2008, the BBC Box suffered a short career as contraband mule before it was abandoned and sold for scrap by an unidentified Macau-based party, reports say.

"Could this story have ended differently?", shipping industry sources ask themselves, in resignation. 

The yearlong BBC Box project was begun in September 2008 with grand hopes. "The Box is an ambitious and unique project for BBC News to tell the story of international trade and globalisation by tracking a standard shipping container around the world," trumpeted the BBC's Box special report web-site.

It continued: "It is a project which plans to...tell the individual stories behind what makes the global economy tick."

Today Ramjahan Seripitath sorts through a pile of matchbox-sized pieces of steel - all that remains of the BBC-branded container after breakers tore it apart two afternoons previous, using garden shears and the rusty winch of a derelict 1975 Jeep.

The project's lofty aims - to uncover what makes the global economy tick - have, in a remarkable twist of fate, come to fruition.

The BBC Box enjoyed a short hey-day. After a well-covered departure from the UK in September 2008, the BBC Box followed the east-going trade routes through the Suez Canal to Singapore, a container terminal in Shanghai, the Long Beach container terminal and embarcation from New York's container terminal. On the way, it carried cargoes as diverse as monosodium glutamate, Scotch whiskey, car parts and household goods. 

Sources within the BBC Box team confirm that the container showed a steady rate of deterioration, roughly equivalent to that seen in global markets. "It started to look a bit ratty in Shanghai, I think. And the container terminals stateside were NOT gentle. Last I saw it, the container showed clear signs of corrosion," said one insider.

Shortly after the BBC Box made its last recorded embarcation, from Santos, Brazil, with a cargo of styrofoam peanuts, it fell off the map. Whether the built-in GPS system was tampered with, or merely fell off, is unclear.

Thanks to the efforts of a London-based broker, the destiny of the BBC Box has now been pieced together.

"Well, it looks like it was used to transport human cargo at some point in the Mediterranean, and there were some armaments and unregistered pharmaceuticals that changed hands as the box shuttled between Western Europe and a few African ports for a while," said the source at Clarkson. "It looks like it was last used as a home somewhere in the Middle East."

Photographs obtained via a simple Google image search show gun-toting Somali pirates atop the BBC Box, perhaps the lowest moment in the short life of the once-vaunted container.

Like the increasingly confused movements of the box, changes in its ownership were erratic, and of dubious probity. Records of a Liberian owner, a Bermudan holding company, a German straw bank account and a post-office box in Hong Kong all played a role at some point, though it is still unclear how.

Said one shipowner with a nominal residence on the Guernsey Islands: "It looks like a typical shipping life-cycle - a creditor in every port."

The BBC Box team could not, at the time this went to press, be reached for comment.

UPDATE: "Albeit unexpected, the fate of the BBC Box provides a telling illustration of the state of the world's shipping industry, and the wider global economic situation," exclaimed the BBC Box team, after days of silence. "This is yet another victory for truth in journalism."

(clipped perchance from The Onion)

[Disclaimer: For those unfamiliar with The Onion, that means that this article is fictitious, i.e. not true].

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