Santiago Garcia-Milà is named president of the International Association of Ports and Harbors



Santiago Garcia-Milà, president of the European Sea Ports Organisation (ESPO) and assistant general manager of the Harbour Authority of Barcelona, is named president of the International Association of Ports and Harbors (IAPH), of which from 2009 he covers the charge of vice-president. The nomination has happened in the course of ventinovesima the biennial conference of the association that today concludes to Amburgo and which has participated beyond 500 representatives more than 300 ports than all the world.

Garci'a-Thousand will succeed to Grant Gilfillan, president of the Australian Harbour Authority of Nova Galles of the South. With its nomination to the summit of the IAPH, it is the first time that the president of the association of the European ports presides also the international association of the ports.

Commenting the new assigned assignment to Garci'a-Thousand, the president of the Harbour Authority of Barcelona, Sixte Cambra, it has expressed it own congratulations and it has evidenced that "this nomination is the result of the job carried out by Santiago Garcia-Milà is in our port that in ESPO and IAPH and is an ulterior demonstration of the leadership of the port of Barcelona in the main relative associations to the portualità".

"It is - Garci'a-Thousand has declared - a great honor and a great responsibility to be elect president of the IAPH in consideration of the important inheritance left from my predecessors during the last few years". Moreover Garci'a-Thousand has praised the job of the Committees and the Secretariat of the IAPH, this last one guided by Susumu Naruse, than - she has emphasized - it will be the key element in order "to reach our objectives" in next the two years.

Speaking about the internal and external challenges that soon IAPH will have to face, Garci'a-Thousand has mentioned among other things, for first, the new Constitution of the association introduced in the conference that is shut today to Amburgo and, for the second ones, "the increase of the ability to the ships, the reduction of the number of the ports of call, the importance of the environmental aspects, the importance of the contribution to the economic value and the competitiveness of the economies that they gravitate around our ports, aspects - she has found - that, between the other factors, they will in the near future condition the investments and the policies for the ports. Our field - it has observed Garci'a-Thousand - is found to face a period of change and adaptation, for which we must work all together in order to exceed the difficulties that are anticipated".