The European Commission should include professional travel related to inland waterway transport in EU guidelines for border management measures in order to solve emerging issues at borders. Two days ago, the European Commission published Covid-19 Guidelines for border management measures to protect health and ensure the availability of goods and essential services.

In order to avoid shortages and avoid that the social and economic difficulties that all European countries are already experiencing worsen, maintaining the flow of goods throughout the EU is key.

The Port of Rotterdam welcomes the guidelines for the transport and mobility sector and especially the priority (‘green’) lanes for the transport of goods across internal borders. The Port of Rotterdam stresses however that professional travel to ensure transport of goods and services should be enabled not only for transport workers, including truck and train drivers, pilots and aircrew, but also inland waterway skippers and personnel in order to ensure the adequate movement of goods and essential staff needed to transport necessary food and medical supplies.