En relación con el grado de afectación del bien jurídico

Historic reflection

In the 1990s the European IWT markets were almost completely liberalised. This was a significant historic achievement, given the fact that for centuries the industry had known price regulation schemes. In order to properly appreciate this milestone one has to be aware of the importance of tolling IWT activities along the Rhine River in the past. A reminder of this in the present landscape is the location of many ancient historic buildings and castles directly alongside rivers. In many cases, this was not done to enjoy the river scenery but to ensure effective and efficient collection of tolls by local parties. This situation ended in 1864 through the Act of Mannheim, resulting in free movement of goods over the Rhine. On the Danube a similar situation exists since the Belgrade convention of 1948.

In order to better accommodate the transition to the liberalised market several scrapping actions were launched in the 1990s to eliminate the structural overcapacity which existed in the regulated market since the 1980s. This scrapping programme, aimed at scrapping old vessels and tried at the same time to prevent new building activities from getting out of control (‘Old-for-new rule‘).

The capacity regulating policy lasted the entire 1990s and was only ended in April 2003.

While experts had some concerns about the merits of liberalisation in the past, the experience of the past decade has taught us that the benefits are much higher than the costs. Customers of the industry and the final consumers have experienced a vastly better level of customer performance by the operators at very reasonable prices in the 1990s and 2000s. The prices, moreover, remained very low in the 1990s and only started to rise in real terms during the second half of the past decade (period 2004-2008) when the IWT freight volumes were growing at very high rates. The boom in this period led to a wave of new building activity and IWT vessels even became, for a time, objects for financial speculators. All this came to a grinding halt when as a consequence of the financial and economic crisis, in 2008 and 2009 freight volumes sharply decreased and ship financing became much more difficult.

Furthermore, the present IWT fleet and IWT companies are highly productive and, in many Member States, the fleet is currently much more well equipped and modern compared to the fleet situation a decade ago, thanks to the high level of competitiveness in the market and the policies leading to the market liberalisation in the 1990s in particular the ‘old-for-new’ rule.

Reflection on trends and developments since the PINE study

The European Commission decided in 2002 to launch a comprehensive study called ‘Prospects of inland navigation within the enlarged Europe’ on the current situation and future prospects of the IWT sector. This study was completed in 2004² and can be considered as a precursor of the present study. The situation at that time was however quite different. Back in 2003/2004 the financial-economic circumstances were much better and there was a focus on the enlarged European Union. It is worthwhile analysing the expected developments mentioned in the PINE study and comparing these with the actual development and the present situation and outlook for the industry.

Development of transport demand

First, with regard to the demand side of the market it must be said that even before the financial and economic crisis effected the market in 2008 and 2009 growth rates of freight volumes were much lower than expected for the past decade at the time of writing the report in 2004. However this was entirely due to an almost complete stand still in freight volumes for IWT in the period up to 2004. In contrast, in the period after that, from 2004 till 2007, average annual growth rates were very high (about 3.8% for the EU27). During the entire period 2000-2007 the transport performance in the New Member States grew at a much higher rate than in the old Member States.

In the second half of 2008, however, the industry faced a sharp decline in transport performance. Because of the financial and economic crisis, the IWT transport performance for the EU27 in 2009 fell back to the level of 1990 (source: EUROSTAT figures 2011). This, moreover, entirely wiped out the positive effects of the enlargement because the fall back to the level of 1990 also occurred in the group of new Member States separately.

Developments in the supply side

Looking at the supply side of the market it is very remarkable that the long period of capacity regulation and the old-for-new regulation — despite the many clear benefits they had — was not able to halt the increase of the average vessel size. On the contrary, in the entire period of EU capacity regulation the average vessel size increased at the same rate as before. It can be concluded from the fleet statistics that there even was a further increase in the time period after 2008 when many new much larger vessels were added to the fleet. Especially in the Rhine corridor this situation occurred because of the booming markets (2004-2008) and the phasing-out process of mono-hull tankers.

Regarding environmental performance, it can be concluded that some progress was made on the emission levels for new engines. Since 2007 new engines have to meet the criteria of emission stage III according to Directive 2004/26/EC.

Another step was made by Directive 2009/30/EC regarding the quality of diesel fuel in inland waterway transport. Since January 2011 the fuel used in IWT contains also a maximum amount of sulphur of 10mg/kg fuel (EN590 specification) and therefore has the same specifications compared to road haulage, resulting in a strong reduction of the emission of SO2 (sulphur dioxide).

2 PINE- prospects of Inland Navigation within the enlarged Europe (March, 2004).

Another important supply side trend, noticed in the PINE study, was the structural shortage of demand in the labour market, both in Western as well as in Eastern European IWT markets. An achievement is the establishment of the Social Dialogue in the inland waterway transport sector that deals with issues such as working times, job profiles, harmonisation of manning requirements and working and living conditions for workers. Also the EDINNA network founded in February 2009 is seen as a positive development towards the harmonisation across Europe of education and training curricula and a further strengthening of the professional competences and more labour market mobility within Europe.

However, despite all efforts to find some relief, in particular from Eastern European countries, the lack of qualified workers is still obvious today and far from finding a solution. The situation constitutes a serious threat for IWT in the next decade, given the average age of staff in the industry. It can be concluded that substantial solutions and efforts are needed in order to prevent severe problems in many parts of the IWT activities.

Infrastructural developments

As regards the state of the waterway infrastructure, the last five years have shown progress in the elimination of bottlenecks, for example in the construction works on the Dutch Maas, the Magdeburg Elbe crossing and the preparations for the construction of the Seine-Nord canal (to be completed by 2017). The solution of the majority of most severe bottlenecks has however not yet materialised.

There is a lack of maintenance on several waterways resulting in reduced fairway depth, reduced reliability and higher transport costs.

On the other hand infrastructure work often meets with environmental concerns.

The required integrative approach towards environmentally sustainable waterway development generally requires more time and financial efforts than initially planned. In particular on the Danube (TEN-T priority project 18) the focus of the TEN-T coordinator — Karla Peijs, active since September 2007 —, has been on the mediation between economic and environmental interests.

The recent proposal by the European Commission for new TEN-T guidelines (October 2011)³, and for the ‘Connecting Europe Facility’⁴ provide a new framework for investments on European level on the Trans European Network. It can be concluded that much more attention is paid to inland waterway infrastructure as well as ports compared to the previous framework. Due to the Corridor Development Plans there is room for the interests of inland waterway transport.

3 COM(2011) 650/2 “Proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on Union guidelines for the development of the trans-European transport network”, SEC(2011) 1212, 1213

4 COM(2011) 665/3 “Proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing the Connecting Europe Facility”, SEC (2011) 1262, 1263

Information and Communication Technology and River Information Services

During the past years a great deal of progress has been made in the field of information and communication technology. In particular the implementation of the River Information Services is a major development in inland waterway transport that supports the integration of IWT in the general ICT systems in logistics (e-Freight). The TEN-T multi-annual programme (2006-2013) has allocated a budget of 50 million euro for the deployment of River Information Services.