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Fight it out
Wednesday 10 March 2010
AS THE race for governor of Liguria hots up, Giovanni Cerruti, president of Genoa’s shipping agents, called in the duelling candidates — perennial foes Claudio Burlando and Sandro Biasotti, respectively left and right of centre — for a grilling from his members on maritime policy.
Their answers were revealing, if not nearly as spikily antagonistic as we have been led to expect on such occasions; unfortunately for lovers of gladiatorial politics they were quizzed separately.
Private commitment
BUT the assembled masses will have been glad to hear both men back private investment in the ports.
They will also have been relieved to hear them commit to continued financial support for the sector as it grapples with the impact of the economic crisis on employment.
They might even have been reassured by the insistence of both candidates that work on the Terzo Valico rail pass through the mountains behind Genoa would continue to completion.
And they probably did not expect much more than the impotent shrug they received from both candidates on the issue of the dismal rail service into Liguria’s ports. Not much we can do, they said, given how much this will cost and how little we have by way of resources.
The one question they did differ strongly on was the performance of port president Luigi Merlo, Biasotti slagging him rather vaguely as “lacking authority” and talking pointedly of “the next president” and Burlando backing his man to the hilt.
Tough talk
IF THE Burlando and Biasotti show was less than sparkling, however, it did at least reveal a picture of Italy’s most important port range through the eyes of those who work there. The answers may not have been scintillating but the agents’ questions combined anger with the system’s many failings with tough talk on what should be done.
Italy’s 25 port authorities, they said, represented a “a perverse mechanism that is distancing our port system from Europe”. Work on infrastructure connections was finally moving forward, but only “after much difficulty” and “in tiny steps”.
The port’s development is also suffering from the “multiple interventions of trial judges” investigating alleged malfeasance in the award of terminal concessions.
Meanwhile, rail connections to the ports are a disaster, and where other regions are setting up their own rail companies to help move cargo from road to rail, Liguria on this score is “absent”.
In short, “the agents are still suffering from the port of Genoa’s lack of competitiveness, with a solid, lasting recovery unlikely this year or even next”.
Can Burlando or Biasotti do much about it? We shall see.
