WORLD MARITIME DAY 2016

• Date Thursday, September 29, 2016
• Venue IMO

Overview

WORLD MARITIME DAY 2016

"Shipping: indispensable to the world" is this year focus for IMO

Every evening, millions of people all over the world will settle into their armchairs to watch some TV after a hard day at work. Many will have a snack or something to drink. It will occur to almost none of them that they have anything to thank shipping for. And yet every one of them undoubtedly owes a debt of gratitude to the unsung industry on which everyone in the world relies.

That TV probably arrived in a containership; the grain that made the bread in that sandwich came in a bulk carrier; the coffee probably came by sea, too. Even the electricity powering the TV set and lighting up the room was probably generated using fuel that came in a giant oil tanker.

The truth is, shipping affects us all. No matter where you may be in the world, if you look around you, you are almost certain to see something that either has been or will be transported by sea, whether in the form of raw materials, components or the finished article. Yet few people have any idea just how much they rely on shipping. For the vast majority, shipping is out of sight and out of mind. But this does a huge disservice to the industry that, quietly and efficiently, day and night, never pausing and never stopping, keeps the world turning and keeps the people of the world fed, clothed, housed and entertained. This is a story that needs to be told. And this is why the theme that has been chosen for World Maritime Day 2016 is "Shipping: indispensable to the world".

The theme was chosen to focus on the critical link between shipping and the everyday lives of people all over the planet, and to raise awareness of the role of IMO as the international 2 regulatory body for international shipping. The importance of shipping in supporting and sustaining today's global society gives IMO's work a significance that reaches far beyond the industry itself.

International trade has evolved such that almost no nation can be fully self-sufficient. Every country relies, to some degree, on selling what it produces and acquiring what it lacks: none can be dependent only on its domestic resources.

Shipping is the only truly cost-effective and sustainable means by which this can be fulfilled. Today, people all over the world rely on ships to transport the commodities, fuel, foodstuffs, goods and products on which we all depend. Maritime transport is the backbone of international trade and the global economy.

According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), around 80% of global trade by volume and over 70% of global trade by value are carried by sea and are handled by ports worldwide. These shares are even higher in the case of most developing countries.

At the beginning of 2015, the world's commercial fleet consisted of nearly 90,000 vessels, with a total carrying capacity of some 1.75 billion dwt. This fleet is registered in more than 150 nations and is manned by more than a million seafarers of virtually every nationality. It is this fleet that enables the import and export of goods, on the scale necessary to sustain the modern world, to take place.

And what incredible ships make up this global fleet. A single ship can carry enough grain to feed nearly four million people for a month; another, enough oil to heat an entire city for a year, and others can carry the same amount of finished goods as nearly 20,000 heavy trucks on the road. Modern ships are, truly, among the engineering wonders of the modern world. Estimates of the volume of shipping trade are usually calculated in tonne-miles - a measurement of tonnes carried, multiplied by the distance travelled. In 2014, according to UNCTAD, the industry shipped 9.84 billion tonnes of cargo for an estimated 52,572 billion tonne-miles of trade - a truly staggering statistic. It is a huge credit to the industry that the vast majority of this indispensable work is completed safely and without incident. It is difficult to quantify the value of world seaborne trade in monetary terms. However, UNCTAD has estimated that the operation of merchant ships contributes about US$380 billion in freight rates within the global economy, equivalent to about 5% of total world trade. 3 The transport cost element in the shelf price of goods varies from product to product, but is ultimately negligible as far as the consumer is concerned.

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