He was among the last presidents to be appointed by the Government, but Paolo Piacenza already has clear ideas of what the role of governance of the ports of Calabria should be.
Your first impressions since arriving in Gioia Tauro?
«I found a port with enormous potential, cutting-edge, and with enormous spaces – the complete opposite of the reality of Genoa – and well organised. A great potential to focus on is logistics, which however is behind other places. When I say that we need to focus on logistics, I don’t think that we want to change and distort the nature of the airport. Transshipment must be strengthened but we should be able, with everyone’s collaboration, to develop backport logistics, and those containers that arrive in Gioia must be processed. The characteristics and concrete possibilities are there.”
But this has never materialized until now. How come? And what should be done?
«If you ask me how to do it in practice, I don’t know yet but we need to talk about it. Genoa and Livorno are privileged ports because they have strong economies behind them like those of Piedmont and Lombardy. In Calabria there is a weaker production sector (lacking a heavy industrial sector) even if there is growth in GDP, as demonstrated by the latest published data. We certainly cannot compare ourselves to the ports of Northern Italy but we must take advantage of the fact that Gioia Tauro is connected to 120 other ports in the world and this is a very important strength. Therefore it is necessary to attract investments from companies from the South also by exploiting the railway connections, which are fundamental for achieving diversification of activities. Then we will be able to attack other markets. I’m not worried about the lack of Calabrian industries because we could also try to carry out the first part of the processing of goods in Gioia and then send them to other areas of Italy and therefore become a logistics hub.”
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