Given your life-long love affairs with both the sea and the cinema, have you managed to see the film The Forgotten Space, screened in New York since last May?

No. The more I read about it in both political and film journals, the more my appetite gets whetted.

Of special interest for us is its portrait of Bilbao. Analogies suggest themselves with ‘Greater Valletta’, the conurbation around the Grand Harbour.

Bilbao is contrasted with three successful ‘superports Rotterdam, Los Angeles and Hong Kong. These have adapted to the age of container cargo traffic.

Bilbao offers a double spectacle. On one side: a decline of its historic, riverine, Atlantic-connecting function. On the other: the Frank Gehry’s neo- baroque, science-fiction looking museum, a successful cultural business enterprise.

The film interprets it as “the most sophisticated expression of the belief that the maritime economy, and the sea itself, is somehow obsolete”.

Could it be that something similar might be happening around the Palumbo shipyards? The directors of the film Alan Sekula and Noel Burch see the Guggenhein Museum in Bilbao as a nostalgic funeral monument for the old, sheltering, deep-water port with its steep hillsides and panoramic vistas. It did not possess the vast tracts of Hinterland needed for container sorting and storage, for which low-lying delta planes are much more suitable.

Consequently, the old environment of sailor bars, brothels and ship chandlers similar to what we had on what are now the Waterfronts and Strait Street are replaced by fictitiously cosmopolitan restaurants preferably adorned with embellished nautical relics, as well as costly sea-view condominiums engineered by estate agents.

Sekula-Burch remind us that in fact today over 90 per cent of the world’s cargo moves by sea; it is the crucial space of the contemporary capitalist-style globalisation taking place. Shipping in this system, in the automobile industry, for instance, has a similar function to that of the conveyer belt within the old single-location car factory: parts of cars are produced in locations all over the world, then transported by mega-ships to a final assembly line.

This mode of production would not evidently have been possible without the invention of the cargo container, which has led to re-dimensioning of ships and radical change in the maritime labour force.

Today’s seafaring cruise, interviewed in the film, are drawn from the old and the new Third World’s: Filipinos, Chinese, Indonesians, Ukrainians, Russians.

In Bilbao itself, even the memory is being lost of the protesting and sometimes mutinous culture of dockers, seafarers, fishermen and shipyard workers. “Their struggles… were fundamental to the formation of the institutions of social democracy and three trade unions.”

The Maltese situation differs. Since 1989 Marsaxlokk has developed into a container transhipment terminal. This deserves a complex discussion in itself.

Do you think that apart from Transport Malta, the rest of the government is doing its utmost for Malta to become a centre of excellence in maritime affairs as part of the strategic vision for Malta over the next few years?

One notable step forward occurred last month when Prof. David Attard was elected to the Bench of 21 Judges at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea with its seat in Hamburg, at the meeting of the representatives of the states which have subscribed to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, held at the UN Headquarters in New York.

This election has multiple significance that does not seem to have been as widely recognised as it should.

In the first place there is the acknowledgement that Malta does have a scholar with the authority to figure in the highest rank of the world’s experts in the field. It was sad that while among the judges there were many friends who had occupied offices at the International Ocean Institute of the University of Malta ranging from Alexander Yankov to Joseph Warioba and Paul Engo, there had been no fellow citizen of Malta.

Attard’s presence flags in no uncertain manner that Malta still has specialists of calibre as well as when Arvid Pardo spoke on its behalf.

Secondly, the tribunal, set up by the convention, has wide jurisdiction on issues that may well directly concern Malta.

It has three chambers: Summary Procedure, Fisheries Disputes, Marine Environment Disputes. Attard’s vast experience not only in the strictly maritime law field but more generally concerning the environment, as in his promotion of UN legislation on climate change, will surely enable him to contribute positively in this very difficult field.

Moreover, the fact in itself of Attard’s election implies that the Maltese delegation to the UN meeting was active and obtained a good result.

That is indeed a very welcome sign as in the past the impression was brightly or wrongly given that Malta was not giving the same priority to Law of the Sea matters as in the years immediately following Independence.

Indeed, some of the bloggers who commented on Attard’s appointment appeared, although I do not know on what grounds, to insinuate that his acumen is not being as fully utilised by our government as when he was acting with full ambassadorial status on these issues.

I am sure that he is still himself capable of finding creative and original ways of making himself useful to our country in an area in which he has trained literally hundreds of lawyers from almost every state in the world over the past 20 years at the IMO International Maritime Law Institute. He is, of course, the Chancellor of our University.

What else is being done?

Today I will only just mention initiatives promoted by the Temi Zammit Foundation (FTZ) such as best utilisation of intermodal transport and revival of the Dghajsa tal-Pass in the Grand Harbour. The topic needs revisiting.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Margaret Zammit.