Unal Baylan, General Manager of Maritime Affairs of the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, said, “The employment of shipmen in the maritime sector brings high income and foreign currency inflows. Related to this, we have made bilateral maritime agreements with 4 countries with very large maritime merchant fleets in the last 1 year. We also increase the quality of education in our maritime schools.
Unal Baylan, Maritime General Manager of the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, answered the questions at the stand of the General Directorate of Maritime Affairs at the 12th Transport and Communications Council organized by the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure.
Stating that they attach importance to the employment of shipmen, Baylan said:
“Our aim is to employ shipmen, one of the biggest export items of our state in the medium term. Related to this, we have made a bilateral maritime agreement with 4 countries with very large maritime merchant fleets in the last 1 year. Our ship people who graduated from our maritime schools will be able to work on many ships of the world without seeking any additional certificates or qualifications. This means a very serious employment. Because employment in the maritime sector brings high income and foreign currency inflows from abroad, we attach great importance to this. As we have increased our bilateral agreements, we are also working to increase the quality of education in our maritime schools.”
Giving examples from the fields of activity of the General Directorate of Maritime Affairs, Baylan said, “We have many duties such as increasing maritime safety, security and trade in Turkey. Our scrap incentive project has just begun. In particular, we support our Turkish shipowners on the condition that the aging ships that complete a certain economic value with the Turkish flag are to be scrapped, on the condition that this scrap cost is approximately 1.5 times. Instead, we get new ships built. In this way, we both increase our business opportunities at the shipyard and we plan to get a larger share of the trade, especially in the Mediterranean basin, with a younger fleet.”
“WE HAVE A VOICE IN WORLD TRADE AND MARITIME”
Emphasizing the importance of maritime for Turkey, Baylan said:
“Maritime is very important for our development. More than 500 million tons of cargo was handled at Turkish ports last year. However, our Turkish maritime trade fleet is among the top 15 in the world. We have a Turkish-owned ship fleet of more than 30 million deadweight tons, we have a say in world trade. As our institution and ministry, we are working to increase these numbers and for our safety in all Turkish maritime areas. I think we will complete it next month, we are bidding on the Eastern Mediterranean Ship Traffic Services system. Thus, we will establish a system with remote monitoring systems that will increase maritime safety in Cyprus. As we are currently establishing and operating in the Turkish Straits.”
Explaining the activities they carried out within the scope of the council, Baylan said, “It is very productive. We were responsible for the preparation of the Maritime Industry Report and the preparation of our targets in the medium-long-short term. Here, at our booth, it can be seen that our Maritime Vocational High School students inform our maritime visitors in a practical way about what the sailor’s knot is for. Knot is very important for our ship people. We also tried to ensure the development of our maritime culture by informing our visitors about this issue.”
“WE HAVE 6 PROJECT SCHOOLS”
Giving information about Maritime Vocational High School students, Baylan said, “We have 6 project schools. We signed a project school protocol with the Ministry of National Education for these 6 high schools. Our aim is to make the curriculum in these schools focus on foreign languages and to enable our graduate students to work on foreign ships abroad. We implemented it this year. I hope that our young people who graduated from this vocational high school will provide more employment in the world market with this project.”
Saying that they set 64 targets at the Council, Baylan said, “We have a digital system, we have our participants vote on the most important ones. From here, we will give priority to the most prominent ones with the participation of our sector representatives and NGOs. We will try to implement this in the short and long term.”
Source: Sabah / Translated by Irem Yildiz