Industry insight : Fidelity shines the light on seafarers’ plight

Ana Victoria Quaas

Aug 17, 2021 – 5.00am

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More than a year on from when Fidelity first raised the plight of seafarers stranded due to Covid-19 measures, things have begun to improve. The number of seafarers stranded aboard their ships is estimated to have halved to 200,000 and the UN recently launched an initiative designed to safeguard seafarers’ rights that covered many of the points we initially raised.

Ana Victoria Quaas, Investment Director, Fidelity International. Supplied.

During the Autumn of 2020, as the Covid-crisis deepened, hundreds of thousands of seafarers became stranded aboard their vessels, as stringent quarantine measures across the world made it impossible to disembark at designated ports or return home by air. By September, over 400,000 seafarers were stranded at sea.

Shipping is responsible for 90 per cent of global trade and essential to maintaining our way of life. To protect global supply chains and seafarers’ health and safety, Fidelity’s sustainable investing team and shipping analysts sounded the alarm by actively engaging with our investee companies on the issue.

We then reached out to other investors to do the same. In December 2020, a consortium of international investors, led by Fidelity, representing US$2 trillion of assets under management called for urgent action to end this humanitarian crisis in an open letter to the UN. We reiterated the need to classify seafarers as ‘key workers’ to enable them to continue to perform their essential services in a safe and secure manner. And as the most effective way to resolve this crisis, we also recommended seafarers have access to vaccines with immediate effect.

Cargo ships at the Port of Los Angeles. Thousands of seafarers are stranded at sea or at various ports around the world since the pandemic began. AP.

Around the same time, the United Nations Assembly called on UN member states to designate seafarers and other marine personnel as key workers and to implement relevant measures to allow stranded seafarers to be repatriated and others to join ships, and to ensure access to medical care.

Since then, the number of stranded individuals has declined thanks to the efforts undertaken by governments, shipowners, and other parties such as trade organisations and investors who continued to raise awareness about the need to resolve this matter urgently.

The UN has also launched the ‘Human Rights Due Diligence Tool’, which says businesses should “undertake human rights due diligence to identify, prevent, mitigate and address adverse human rights impacts on seafarers resulting from restrictions to crew changes. This involves putting pressure — individually and collectively — on governments and maritime transport providers to ensure respect for seafarers’ rights.”

This is a welcome development and mirrors many of the points raised by Fidelity, including the need to:

Urge charterers and other business partners to be flexible and to accept route deviation requests from shipping companies to facilitate crew changes
Encourage these companies to consider contributing to or sharing the costs of deviation and other expenses relating to the pandemic
Call on government authorities to implement coordinated, consistent policies and legal measures designed to alleviate the situation of seafarers during the pandemic, such as designating seafarers as “key workers” and implementing the framework of protocols recommended by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO).

Despite recent improvements, however, the issue has not been fully resolved and the threat of new Covid-19 variants could quickly reverse the tide. Today, fewer than 60 countries have responded to the UN’s initiative and designated seafarers as key workers. Seafarers are also not being prioritised in many countries’ vaccination roll-out plans.

We therefore continue to urge fellow investors to engage with companies on this issue, governments to take the necessary action and the media to keep raising awareness of the seafarers’ plight.