To Address Shortage of Maritime Officers, Industry Turns to PR

By WILLIAM ALZONA
www.ofwjournalism.net

MANILA (OFW Journalism Consortium) —GIVEN the shortage of maritime officers for international vessels, the manning industry is turning to re-package what its players say is a “wimpy” image of the Filipino seafaring career.

Hence, manning agency executives like Edgardo U. Manese are reaching out to the Philippine media so that, he says, the latter can help “cleanse” the image of Filipino seafarers.

Manese, Magsaysay Maritime Corp. chairman, said the move to tap media was borne out of the agreements during the Philippine Manning Convention in Manila in November.

We admitted we couldn’t solve the shortage of officers on our own, Manese said.

Manese, who is also president of Philippine-Japan Manning Consultative Council Inc., added “recent facts have been unearthed,” supporting that conclusion.

One of these facts is incongruency in data.

“How can we respond [to the shortage of maritime officers] if we could not even take stock of the seafaring industry,” he said.

In short, there is no single database that would allow private and public sectors to have the same actual number of officers and ratings that are both on-board ships and those waiting to be hired.

He said data from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration cannot confirm the validity of the actual number of available seafarers and those who are on board.

The POEA is the government agency in charge of regulation of all the overseas Filipino workers.

Menese cited that data from the Professional Regulations Commission also hasn’t been helpful in such task.

He explained the group found out that the POEA only sources its data from the manning firms themselves, many of which are not complying to the disclosure rule that the agency only implemented earlier this year.

A report by manning firms presented during the November convention said six factors hobble the industry’s ability “to reasonably make a more detailed, and accurate estimate of numbers of our actual supply situation.”

The factors include “extreme large volume of data, the use of many different titles and ranks for different positions, the numerous vessel types, the unknown license requirements for special vessels, time constraints, and …non-compliance with POEA’s advisory by some companies.”

Missing

IT was also during the convention that manning agencies discovered a huge disparity in figures.

Comparing the number of those with PRC license versus the number of officers on-board and those on vacation, some 43,462 crew members couldn’t be accounted for.

The figure is already close to the more than 48,000 officers reported on board several vessels.

Taking stock of the actual supply of Filipino seafarers on-board and how many more are in the maritime schools were the initial steps in determining if the country can respond to the global shortage of officers.

According to the ISL Bremen for World fleet and the Clarkson Research Studies for Shipbuilding, there will be 7,360 new vessels up for delivery between now and 2012.

With each vessel containing up to 23 crew members, the total demand will be 147,160 crews until 2012 and there will be more by 2015.

The worldwide supply of seafarers in 2005 is estimated to be 466,000 officers and 721,000 ratings, according to the estimates by the Warwick Institute for Employment and Research.

There is a shortage of about 10,000 officers, or two percent of the workforce as of 2005.