As the weather gets hotter and the seas get calmer, hardly a day goes by without us hearing of yet another tragedy where people perish in the Mediterranean Sea.

Yester was one such day, but this article was penned at 6pm, and as daytime slips into evening and then night, anything could have happened.

The latest images which our news portal put online involved a video taken by a seaman on board a Maltese freighter which was called in to aid immigrants who were on a dinghy that was floundering. They were only a hundred-or-so kilometres off Africa and yet their boat – if you can call it that – was already half flooded.

The scenes of desperation as people tumbled into the sea to reach out for ropes lowered by the crew were harrowing and a very disturbing. The survivors told tales of how a number of people just dropped off the dinghy and were lost at sea.

The Prime Minister has taken every possible opportunity to speak about the subject in international fora, the latest being in Switzerland. The Prime Minister says that the onus is on Europe o save lives in a collective effort. We could not agree more and we back the government in its efforts to do so.

The European Parliament also convened on Wednesday to speak about the issue once more. While the fact that the issue is firmly on the agenda is welcome, we must emphasise that more action is needed.

So far, it is still Italy and Malta who are doing all the legwork. Many merchant vessels have pitched in and MOAS also does its bit. But more action is needed. Italian officials believe that there are up to one million people waiting to cross the Mediterranean. The smugglers have switched tactics and are using inflatable dinghies – which can be set up in minutes – rather than old fishing boats to send migrants on their way.

More often than not, the dinghies take on water within a few hours, but sometimes the lucky ones make it further and they are eventually rescued by some vessel or another. The EU said it had a 10-point plan. But the summit on 23 April took place two weeks ago and so far not much has been done.

There has been bickering between the UK and Italy because a British vessel based in Sicily was not sent out on rescue missions because it was unclear who would take any migrants that are saved. That has been resolved. But everything has gone eerily quiet. All the talk of dispatching naval and air assets to the Mediterranean seems to have gone by the wayside and now there is also division over whether the EU is right or wrong to destroy smugglers’ boats. It seems irrelevant now anyway because one cannot destroy a dinghy that is packed in a box and inflated within an hour.

The problem is only going to get worse. It will not disappear and migrants – once they make it to Italy – will continue to pay middlemen to get them to Northern Europe. The solution has to be multifaceted and multidimensional. But one thing is certain, the problem is a collective one and not one that just affects the southern periphery of the EU.