traditionally have not used many Indian officers, asking the management
companies in Bombay area for support in manning 500 of their ships - that means -
recruiting of officers for 500 new ships from India. - The result will be an absolute
vacuum cleaning of the Indian market for officers.
2.3 Alternative labour supplying countries
To our opinion, the traditional labour supplying countries in the Far
East, might have difficulties in meeting the increased demand for officers. We therefore
have to look for new labour supplying countries.
Some of the countries in the earlier Eastern Europe are interesting.
The same relates to China. - But we think that it will take some time to increase the
output from this countries. And the result might be some very difficult years ahead - with
increasing shortage of officers available at the international market as a result.
3. The situation in Norway
The foreign seafarers in the Norwegian fleet have come to stay. We take
our owners report of increasing difficulties in our major labour supplying countries as
clear indication that the conclusion in the BIMCO/ISF study is likely to be correct.
The coming decade, we think, is the decade of golden opportunities for
our shipping companies, and the international shortage might represent a golden
opportunity for Norwegian officers the years ahead.
Our maritime education system have to some extent been reorganized and
upgraded, and now we have two parallel tracks. One through the three years maritime
academies, and one in two years maritime technical schools. The education in both is, as
far as we can judge, on a high international level.
There is an increasing interest among our owners to use Norwegian
officers. The problem we face is declining interest among gifted youngsters for a maritime
profession. - The applicants to engineofficer education in our maritime academies have
gone down with 40% over the last 3 years.
4. Challenges for our owners
In 1986 we had an international consultant company to study our
maritime industry to give their views on strengths and weaknesses in the different sectors
of our maritime industry.
One of their conclusion was that customer see Norwegian owners and
operators as highly reliable and technically innovative. Further our customers said that
in specialized, industrial shipping, Norway has few equals.
