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ITF backs campaign to promote jobs at sea
20 November 2008
The ITF has this week signed up to an initiative intended to boost seafaring as a career and head off an impending shortage of recruits.
The Go to Sea! Project is an industry-wide initiative led by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and backed by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and several shipping associations, as well as the ITF. The campaign calls on its signatories to promote the positive aspects of seafaring and oppose the negative ones, such as the criminalisation of seafarers and the refusal to grant shore leave. It also acknowledges that, in spite of the current economic challenges facing international shipping, the industry must plan for the future to avoid a shortfall in trained seafarers to crew the world fleet. Suggested activities include increasing training places, lobbying governments, promoting seafaring to schools, developing educational materials, and working to attract women into jobs at sea.
Speaking at the launch of the scheme in London, UK, this week, IMO Secretary General Efthimios Mitropoulos said: “A stark indication of just how serious the shortage is becoming came in a recent report which assessed the current shortfall of officers in the global fleet to be some 34,000. Moreover, based on fleet growth projections, the report predicts that by 2012 the officer shortfall will have risen to 83,900.”
He added: “Shipping transports over 90 per cent of the world’s commerce safely, securely, efficiently and at a fraction of the environmental impact and cost of any other form of bulk transportation. As we like to say in the industry, without ships and without the seafarers to man them, one half of the world would freeze for lack of the fuel to heat it and the other half would starve for lack of the grain that gives it its daily bread.”
Cleopatra Doumbia-Henry of the ILO supported his call and added that the ILO had sought to “raise the profile of living and working conditions for seafarers so that young people will be attracted to a life at sea.”
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