For Juan José Rodríguez Marichal, president of the Fuerteventura Chamber of Commerce and a member of the board of the Port Authority of Las Palmas, the debate over the maritime link between Fuerteventura and Tarfaya has been captured by a simplistic perspective. Far from being an exercise in accumulated frustration, Marichal argues the project requires a much more ambitious technical, economic and strategic approach. ‘In recent days, various articles and opinions have been published about the maritime connection between Fuerteventura and Tarfaya that address the issue exclusively from the perspective of accumulated failure, economic unviability or political confrontation,’ laments the businessman from Majorca, as he puts it.
Largo plazo
Rodríguez Marichal calls for raising the quality of the public debate, moving beyond the noise to focus on diversification. ‘Another frequent mistake is to judge this connection exclusively from a tourism viewpoint or in terms of passenger traffic,’ he warns. The real potential, he insists, lies in foreign trade, goods transit, business cooperation, port services, regional logistics, industrial projects and supply chains. For the Chamber president, the time for ‘political caricatures’ must end: ‘The debate on Tarfaya needs fewer maximalist headlines and more technical, economic and institutional analysis.’ His reflection is an invitation to responsibility: ‘The real debate is not only whether a shipping line is profitable today. The real debate is what position the Canary Islands want to occupy in the Atlantic over the coming decades.’
Dificultades
The business leader acknowledges the scars left by the sinking of the Assalama ferry in 2008 and the long list of promises that have fallen by the wayside. ‘It is clear that the route has faced enormous difficulties since the interruption of service in 2008. It is also true that over the years there have been announcements, forecasts and calendars that ultimately did not materialize. Denying that reality would make no sense,’ he admits. However, for Marichal, using these events as ammunition to demand the project be definitively archived is a diagnostic error: ‘Turning this succession of delays into an absolute disqualification of the project means ignoring a fundamental issue: strategic infrastructures do not always respond exclusively to criteria of immediate private profitability.’
Rodríguez Marichal’s argument is supported by the archipelago’s own recent history. ‘The Canary Islands know this reality well,’ he says. ‘Many essential air and sea connections for territorial cohesion, regional balance or economic integration require, in their early stages, institutional support, public incentives and sustained planning over time.’ Against that backdrop, he says the connection with Tarfaya should not be an exception, but rather a case study in how to integrate territories with structural limitations. ‘The Fuerteventura–Tarfaya connection must be analyzed precisely in that context,’ the Chamber president argues.
Capacidad estratégica
For the member of the Las Palmas Ports board, the end goal is to place the islands on the Atlantic logistics map. ‘The underlying issue is not only whether a shipping company makes profits from day one of operations. The real issue is whether the Canary Islands want to play a relevant economic and logistics role in the mid-Atlantic and in its relationship with West Africa,’ Marichal says. In his view, Fuerteventura has the ingredients needed to act as an exchange and cooperation platform. ‘To give up exploring that possibility solely because the private market does not, on its own, assume the initial risk would mean limiting the archipelago’s future strategic capacity.’
With that scenario in mind, Marichal calls on the regional executive to take a step forward. ‘If the maritime connection with Tarfaya is considered of strategic interest for the Canary Islands, it is clear that the regional government must take a more proactive role in its development,’ he underlines. The Chamber’s proposal does not entail absolute state control, but rather “intelligent cooperation”. In the words of its president, institutional leadership should translate into ‘temporary incentives for operations, support mechanisms linked to public service obligations, customs and logistics coordination, stable logistics, administrative simplification, permanent institutional agreements with Morocco, and specific support for Canary exporters and importers.’ Without this framework, he says, ‘it becomes extremely difficult to demand that any private operator shoulder on its own the high operating costs and initial commercial uncertainties.’
The entry ‘The Tarfaya dilemma’: Rodríguez Marichal urges against simplistic views on the Fuerteventura connection was published first on encanarymaritime.com.
