(A confession: I wrote
this piece a month and a half ago after IMO Secretary General Koji Sekimizu
opined in a blog on near-future officer shortages after The Danish Maritime
Forum in Copenhagen. I held off publication fearing I would be accused of being
repetitive, since I have written about this stuff before. Nonetheless, I feel,
now, that another warning is worthwhile.)
I have become accustomed to taking officer shortage
predictions with a dollop of salt when they are spewed out by the captains of
our industry. I know that their intentions are not honourable; they are in the
business of enticing hundreds- or thousands, if they can- of youngsters based
on these fanciful numbers. Swelling idle seafarer numbers cost them nothing and
exaggerating demand is in their DNA.
I have a problem, though, when the topmost honcho of the
topmost maritime agency in the world repeats, in writing in a blog, these
bizarre numbers that remind me of the fanciful predictions that are being made
about Indian stock market indices and how equity investments will multiply manifold
in a few years.
The logic shipmanagers and shipowners have sold to many,
including Mr Sekimizu, apparently, is this: The current fleet is going to
increase in size by 70 percent in the next fifteen years because a) see the
past numbers and extrapolate(!) and b) shipping has to meet the increasing
demand for seaborne trade with the growth of the world economy. So, their simple
mathematics tells us that, if half the current number of half a million
officers retires during this period, we would need to train an additional
600,000 officers to meet demand. At the very least, this logic says, we need
half a million more officers by 2030. We had better start now; we need to train
about 40,000 of them every year!
Where do these figures come from? Are they carefully reached
or pulled out a hat? Do they take into account the unknown number of seamen and
cadets without jobs or training berths today? Do they factor in the huge
tonnage overhang or the fact that the industry claims that slow steaming is
here to stay? Do the numbers take into account the massive ships that are coming
out and the fact that every one of those ships means that two or three jobs-
across each rank- will disappear?
I strongly suspect that shipping, fragmented and HRD-clueless,
is actually incapable of producing any seafarer-demand numbers with any degree
of accuracy. Besides, new environmental laws mean that the game has changed; we
will probably see shorter vessel working life spans in the next decade, and we
will almost certainly see more consolidation in some trades and more fragmentation
in others. The offshore sector will throw up some surprises, too. To expect
that shipping’s mandarins know it all- when many of them have a history of
getting it wrong- is optimistic. To believe that they have no conflict of
interest when they churn out officer shortage numbers is worse than optimistic;
it is delusional.
By all accounts, Mr Sekimizu is an honourable man. Even more
reason, then, to examine the numbers a little more carefully. Even more reason,
then, to realise that what is in the industry’s interest is often not in the
interests of the lowly seaman. Even more reason to be circumspect and not believe
numbers that have been pulled out of a crooked hat; I am sure he does not want
to become responsible for another horde of seamen running around from pillar to
post in the streets of Mumbai and Manila looking for the hundreds of thousands
of promised jobs that simply are not there.
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