Shipping’s next crisis could be crewing, not just trade routes, O’Neil says

Mark O’Neil, CEO of Columbia Group, has questioned whether the shipping industry is heading for a wider crewing shortage, as conflict in the Middle East, fuel disruption in the Philippines and rising repatriation costs place growing strain on global crewing.

In Mr O’Neil’s view, the industry risks focusing too heavily on freight, routing and insurance, while giving too little attention to a more immediate and potentially more serious issue: whether enough seafarers will continue to join and leave vessels under increasingly difficult conditions.

He believes the pressure is no longer confined to what happens at sea. Rather, with security concerns rising in and around the Gulf, fear of operating in higher-risk areas is now being compounded by disruption to domestic travel in the Philippines and the rising cost of flights for relief crews, all of which is beginning to weigh on the movement of seafarers through the system.

His concern, therefore, is that the cumulative impact is becoming too significant for the industry to dismiss as a short-term operational complication.

As Mr O’Neil put it, “The industry needs to ask itself a very direct question: are we creating the conditions for a wider crewing shortage?”

He added that if seafarers are being asked to accept greater personal risk, while at the same time it becomes harder and more expensive to move them to and from vessels, “then this stops being only a security issue. It becomes a workforce issue for the industry.”

Moreover, he cautioned that “you cannot look at this purely through the lens of vessel transit or insurance premiums.”

The industry, he said, also has to look at “what is happening behind the scenes, including the pressure on crew changes, the uncertainty around repatriation, the rising cost of flights, and the effect of fuel disruption in countries like the Philippines, which remain critical to global crewing.”

For Mr O’Neil, the real danger lies in assuming that seafarers will continue absorbing rising risk and disruption without consequence.

He argues that family concerns, fatigue and logistical barriers are all intensifying at once, and that the industry may be underestimating how quickly confidence in the crewing pipeline could begin to weaken if that burden continues to grow.

Indeed, he said shipping should be “very careful not to mistake professionalism for unlimited tolerance of danger.”

“There comes a point,” he said, “where fear, fatigue, family pressure and logistics all start pushing in the same direction.”

If that happens, he warned, “the next crisis for shipping will not just be about trade routes. It will be about whether there are enough people willing to serve on them.”

And, as he made clear, “at the end of the day, shipping depends on seafarers.”

If the industry does not take seriously “what this environment is doing to crew confidence, crew mobility and crew welfare”, he said, “it will be facing more than temporary disruption. It will be facing a serious crewing problem.”