A WEB page enabling workers to gain rapid access to essential information about their health and safety rights and responsibilities has been set up by the Health and Safety Executive.

The "workers’ webpage" http://www.hse.gov.uk/ workers
- covers the roles and responsibilities of employers and employees, as well as issues such as ‘whistle-blowing’ and reporting accidents.

EDITORIAL

Now it is Panama’s turn to celebrate, in eight year’s time, the centennial of the 1914-built canal with presumed needed expansion owing largely to China’s rise in global trade participation and Panama’s own wishes to cash in on the east-west traverse that saves global shipping time and money. (No, never mind that marine scientists have noted weird presence of marine life previously inhabiting only one ocean and not the other, or that despite the projected expansion, more than 50% of present bottom orders would still find it hard maximizing the Panama Canal’s famed locks.)

Transferred in 1999 by the US to Panama, the Canal has grown in importance in the liberal global era dominated by the different trading blocks, multinational firms, international shipping, and transnational capital.

Panamax-size vessels tailored to allow passage to ships ferrying 4,000 containers will soon give way to those post-Panamax ones that can, with new canal width and depth, bring through 10,000 containers. Other vessel types too that can use the canal are predicted by shipping think tanks to impact, some radically, on different eastern ports now serving as hubs in the busiest trading area in the planet.

Panama serves notice to the world that a poor country that has lent its isthmus, like the Suez from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean, to world economic advance, apart from the flag it lent to post-World War II surplus bottoms sailing as cross-traders in the period of pax Americana.

No wonder that the Pierce Brosnan movie “Taylor of Panama” would insinuate Chinese interests in taking possession of the Canal — this passage isn’t simply the means for vessels and cargo crossing from one ocean to another but also the vehicle of contentious global actors to a new level of significance and power. 

Government and friends of Panama would — a predictably tense local situation that posits the proverbial poverty question notwithstanding — help out in putting up the US$5 billion requirement to enlarge the canal. But for what? It therefore comes to the threshold of a global maritime state that privileges geography and movements that the new era had spawned. Who rises to position of power and advantage remains a question.

Take the case of the island state of Cyprus, now proud with being better in maritime administration than some European Union countries and holding in its name substantial percentage of European-owned shipping, not to exclude giving berth to famed shipmanagement firms. When Limassol-flagged ships formed part of the “runaway ships” in recent memory, Cyprus, like or together with Panama and Honduras, was haven to shipping interests that evaded stronger state regulations and taxation.

Nowadays, Cyprus and Panama are proud of their maritime agencies, the former even have a department-level unit to take care of its important economic sector. The agencies attached to their main maritime organizations have an expanse that covers the operational extent of the global maritime regime.

We may have our own issues with some policies of these two countries that affect our own interests in world shipping but we cannot help but get envious of the persistence of these small states to register their own claims to the maritime sphere.

On this end, claims to 250,000 seafarer deployment in 2005 — a large part in the non-officer categories —together with over a billion dollar remittance bolsters the unfortunate pride in being the third most dominant national workforce in world shipping.

After Panama and Cyprus, how else can the Philippines rise to being a maritime nation when a private-led economic sector is trumped by state ineptitude, corruption and myopia? We guess that answers to these may come with changes in the way we see things today and tomorrow.

Panama has a canal, Cyprus proximity. Certainly, the Philippines has much more to offer.
 

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