As many as one in five Filipinos working in shipping could lose their jobs in the fallout from the global economic crisis, a government official has warned.
Yet at the same time the country faces the dilemma of how to increase its output of officers to meet the forecast shortage of skilled and qualified personnel.
Marianito Roque.
The main threat to seagoing employment comes, the Philippines labour secretary Marianito Roque believes, from a slump in tourism hitting the cruiseship sector.
A fifth of all Filipinos working at sea are employed on cruiseships, although many will work in the hotel and catering departments.
Roque said out of 226,900 Filipinos “deployed” (recorded as leaving the country for overseas employment) last year in seagoing jobs, 47,782 were on passenger or cruiseships.
“Our primary consideration is the continued employment of our seafarers in the face of the real possibility of an employment crunch that the financial crisis is expected to bring about,” he added.
But he noted of the total deployed in 2007 only 23% were officers, of which around a quarter were third engineers or third mates.
Forecasts of the global officer shortage, heavily influenced by expectations of the number of new ships built, range from one made in 2005 of 27,000 by 2015 to a more recent and much higher figure of 90,000 by 2012.
While the Philippines government has introduced a range of initiatives to increase the number of qualified officers, foreign owners either in national groupings or individually have also invested heavily in their own cadet training or retraining schemes.
Last year the London-based International Maritime Employers Committee, whose members employ around 65,000 Filipinos including 20,000 officers, estimated only a fifth of the annual intake qualify and get jobs four years later.
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