Foment del Treball assures that society says “enough” to the delays with the Mediterranean Corridor

2023-07-07 17:30:17

The president of Foment del Treball, Josep Sánchez Llibre, has participated in the action that the #VullCorredor campaign, organized by the Valencian Business Association (AVE), has carried out in Barcelona. This campaign claims to complete the necessary investments to make effective the Mediterranean rail corridor between Algeciras and the French border, which affects a territory that is 44% of Spanish GDP and 50% of Spanish exports.

President Sánchez Llibre has indicated that “the Mediterranean Corridor must be finished once and for all” and added that “this is a global demand; civil, economic and business society say enough is enough”. For the employers’ leader, we have the need to “build the future” and, to achieve this, “it is necessary to reach consensus, dialogue and demand, convince and seek the complicity of the State administration so that non-compliance and delays end, and the the Mediterranean Corridor is underway, making these 15 years of non-compliance a reality”.

President Josep Sánchez Llibre has considered “incomprehensible and unfortunate” that Catalonia, the Valencian Community, Murcia and Andalusia are not connected by rail. The employers’ leader considers it vital to launch the Mediterranean Corridor to move goods by rail, but also to connect ports such as Algeciras, Valencia, Tarragona and Barcelona. And this would make it possible to guarantee a more sustainable mobility within the 2030 objectives, taking into account that in Spain the transport of goods by rail has a testimonial share (over 4%).

Therefore, we can make a logistics and industrial center of the first magnitude in our house that inexcusably requires a commitment to the transport of medium and long-haul goods, increasing the role of the railway.

The recipe proposed by Sánchez Llibre is that “we must build a future with consensus and dialogue to claim, convince and seek the complicity of the different administrations, but basically the State”.

The general director of the AVE, Diego Lorente, recalled that “we started this movement because there was an anomaly that we did not understand: how can it be that the second and third cities in the State were not connected at high speed, Spain being the country that more high-speed kilometers after China?