A joint Italy-Spain approach to transport policies in the Mediterranean

The conference “Transport and logistics in the Western Mediterranean: enhancing connectivity for a more prosperous region”, which took place on October 19 in Rome at the Confitarma’s headquarters, was organised by Eurispes, the Institute of Political, Economic and Social Studies, in collaboration with representatives from the Spanish side, in particular the Italian Delegation of the Government of Catalonia, the European Mediterranean Institute IEMED (Gerona), and the Centre for Transport Studies in the Western Mediterranean (CETMO – Barcelona).

The initiative was promoted in an important phase in which negotiations are underway at European level for the revision of the TEN-T Corridors. Hence the usefulness of a joint study between Italian and Spanish realities aimed at preventing possible solutions that would penalise the Mediterranean reality, in particular the Western Mediterranean one, in a situation – as the President of Eurispes, Gian Maria Fara, pointed out in his speech – in which the Mediterranean reality is still very fragmented and subject to the interventions of large non-European competitors, such as China.

The European Maritime Space (EMS) must be able to refer to an organic development project that confirms the centrality of the Mediterranean: this is the requirement expressed by Luca Danese, Coordinator of the Eurispes Observatory on Infrastructure, Transport and Logistics, and taken up by the Italian and Spanish participants.

Functional to this strategic objective was the speech by Luca Salomone, coordinator of the Mission Structure for Sea Policies, who illustrated the “Plan for the Sea” recently approved by the Council of Ministers and soon to be published in the Official Gazette. This is the first organic Plan on the subject, divided into 16 areas of intervention, coming after a long period of fragmented initiatives.

According to Confitarma’s Director General, Luca Sisto, the green transition, a compulsory step for everyone, operators and citizens alike, can certainly be a great opportunity to improve the quality of structures and services and to assert a more incisive competitive capacity, but it must also be managed in a systemic manner if one wants to avoid the risks of a loss of positioning for European operators and structures. In maritime transport and related services – he emphasised – the distances are becoming increasingly less geographical and more economic between those capable of maintaining a real competitive capacity. A similar orientation emerged from the speech by Pino Musolino, President of the Mediterranean Ports Association (Medports).

In his conclusions, Eurispes’ Secretary General, Marco Ricceri, proposed the establishment of a permanent round table on the governance of the Mediterranean maritime system, thereby gathering the interest and willingness of his Spanish colleagues to continue working in close synergy: Roger Albinyana, Director of IEMED, Enric Pons, for CETMO, Francesc Carbonell, Head of the Transport Section of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), Monika Kiss, European Parliament analyst, Jordi Espin, Secretary General of Transprime, Josep-Vicent Boira-Maiques, Spanish Government Commissioner for Mediterranean Corridors.

 

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