The world arms trade grew by 1.9% in 2021 in relation to the previous year, according to data published this Monday by a Swedish NGO that has been monitoring arms sales by the world's hundred leading companies in the sector for three decades. . This increase does not yet take into account the balances for 2022, so currently that percentage could be much higher, taking into account that the war in Ukraine began last February.
The one hundred main world manufacturers sold weapons for about 560,000 million euros in 2021, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri), which represents a consecutive increase for the seventh consecutive year.
From these data it can be deduced that the global arms trade did not stop growing, despite the pandemic, although it slowed down. The growth rate of 1.9% from 2020 to 2021 was higher than that from 2019 to 2020 (1.1%), but it was still below the average of the four years prior to the covid pandemic (3, 7%).
The organization assures that the problems in the supply chain generated by the pandemic affected the production of arms, and that these same problems could be occurring this year because of the war in Ukraine.
In addition to being a manufacturer, Russia is also a supplier of the raw materials necessary for the production of weapons, so that the sanctions and restrictions of the main powers on Russian exports and imports could impact the sector. Likewise, Sipri assures that Russia is having problems accessing the semiconductors it buys abroad as components of its weapons systems.
“There could have been even greater growth in arms sales in 2021 had it not been for persistent problems in the supply chain,” Lucie Béraud-Sudreau, director of the Military Expenditure and Production Production Program, said in a statement. Weapons of the Sipri. “Both the big arms companies and the smaller ones said that their sales had been affected during the year (2021). Some companies, such as Airbus and General Dynamics, also reported labor shortages,” adds Béraud-Sudreau.
