While our Malta Maritime Authority struggles to defend its credibility, following the alleged cases of corruption related to the issue of licences to boat owners, valuable opportunities are being lost to promote Malta as a centre of excellence for the various maritime services, which are booming in the Mediterranean at present. The Mediterranean is seeing a revival of economic activity mainly as a result of the buoyant offshore oil and gas industry.

Unfortunately, over the past 20 years Malta has limited its maritime services mainly to ship repair, transhipment, and ship registration services. Our inertia in other sectors of the maritime industry has meant that countries like Cyprus, Greece and Turkey have continued to expand their activity in these sectors and are reaping the benefits for their economy.

With the price of oil close to its historical highs, there is a beehive of activity on the North and West African shores to extract oil and gas from new fields, and other fields that up to some time ago were considered to be too uneconomical to work. This quite apart form the fact that the booming world economy, based mainly on the remarkable success of China as an exporting nation, has meant that the Mediterranean is once again a busy highway as ships ply between Asia and Europe.

All these developments offer immense opportunities for our country to once again establish itself as a leader in the maritime services sector. The list of activities we could undertake is long and attractive.

Tugs, towing and salvage services; lifting gear services; marine pollution control; safety, survival and training; specialised small boat building; ship management; port, harbour and marine construction; dredging; hydrographical survey services and diving and underwater services, are just a few of the activities we should encourage to be established in Malta.

These industries are ideal for our economy because they inflict little stress on our environment, offer an opportunity to diversify the services sector of our economy, which in future may become too dependent on finance, tourism and IT&C, and offer job opportunities at various levels of skills to the thousands of young people who enter our labour market every year.

But our natural competitive advantages will not necessarily translate themselves into real economic advantage unless we work hard to make things happen. The present administration has neglected the maritime sector for far too long with the result that Malta’s reputation in this field is often unfairly equated with the unfortunate incidents like that of the Erica.

We need to fight the unjust perception that Malta is just another flag-of-convenience country. We can do this by promoting a long-term plan for the expansion of our island as a centre of maritime excellence in the middle of the Mediterranean.

A new Labour government will inject new life into this sector, because we believe that our strengths in this area can be formidable. As we did in the financial services sector, we will promote a bipartisan approach to the promotion of this industry.

We will also encourage local and foreign entrepreneurs who have experience in this sector to set up business in Malta, preferably in a designated locality, which will be dedicated mainly to house a cluster of companies providing such maritime services. We will also make sure that the limited access left in our port areas will not be wasted on projects that add little value to our economy, but optimised to enhance the various marine services we will be encouraging.

We have squandered opportunities to exploit our maritime strengths for far too long. But this will change in the next few months when a new Labour government will help our business leaders to rediscover our maritime vocation.

Charles Mangion is deputy leader of the Opposition and the MLP’s main spokesperson on the economy and finance

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www.mangioncharles.com