Kenya is pushing for a joint anti-piracy surveillance by Indian Ocean countries to lower the cost burden on individual states and safeguard key economic sectors like fishing and shipping.

Transport secretary Michael Kamau said Wednesday that users of the route through the coast of Somalia remained vulnerable to piracy despite a sharp drop in the number of incidents reported since last year.

READ: Somali waters still not safe as first cargo ship since 2012 is seized

“We must come together as a region to bear the burden of anti-piracy surveillance and deterrence costs in addition to the costs of combating illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing,” he said in a speech read by his Mining counterpart, Najib Balala, at a regional conference in Nairobi.

READ: Co-operation key in piracy clampdown

Kenya has been at the forefront in combating piracy in Somalia. In 2011 the country launched a military incursion into Somalia following a series of kidnapping by Al-Shabaab militants within its territory. It later rehatted as part of the UN backed African Union Mission.

The incursion by the Kenya Defence Forces has, however, proved a nightmare in terms of the budget.

The Treasury disclosed that as at November 2013 Kenya’s incursion into Somalia had cost more than Sh26 billion whose reimbursement Nairobi is urgently seeking to ease its budgetary constraints. It is not clear if the money has fully been reimbursed by the UN.

Mr Kamau said the piracy on the Gulf of Aden had seriously affected trade in the region and urged regional countries to help eradicate the menace.

“Our fishing industry, the second pillar of our economy, was almost brought to a standstill with far reaching implications for our way of life, affecting as it did from artisanal to industrial fisheries and the potential development of this sector,” he said.

Apart from the onshore military incursion, a multinational deployment of naval forces around the Gulf of Aden has also helped lower the number of piracy attacks in the past two years.

Navies have stepped up pre-emptive action against pirates, including strikes on their bases on the Somali coast. Statistics showed that the number of attacks by Somali pirates dropped sharply in 2013.

There were 176 confirmed piracy attacks in the region in 2011 and 36 in 2012, but this fell to just seven attacks in 2013 and no ships in that year were successfully seized.

READ: Piracy attacks in East Africa drop

A recent report by the World Bank showed since the first attack in 2005, pirates have netted between $315 million and $385 million in ransom paid from the 149 ships seized so far.

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