A FEW years back, World Toilet Day marked the plight of the 2.5bn people on this planet who live without modern sanitation with a crude but rather memorable slogan. We’ll leave it to your imagination to guess what they said they gave.

With the campaigning calendar now packed with international days of this and world days of that, the soundbites have to fight hard for attention.

Sandwiched somewhere between Sustainable Gastronomy Day and International Asteroid Day, you will find the allotted annual outpouring of gratitude for the 2m people keeping world trade afloat.

The Day of the Seafarer matters. But it should matter more.

Externally, everyone from the UN secretary-general António Guterres to earnest shipping company executives are on parade, extolling the virtues of the workforce at the coalface.

They collectively salute the bravery and resilience of those who form the backbone of our industry. They connect the world and deliver the goods and energy we need, the LinkedIn posts remind us.

Without them, half the world would starve and the other half would freeze, echo the stream of statements, videos and social media herograms.

But as we publicly acknowledge the debt that we owe seafarers for keeping global supply chains moving, regardless of storms both meteorological and geopolitical that lie in their path, there is an internal recognition that the sloganeering misses a significant part of their story.

We casually skirt around the fact that over 400 cases of ship abandonment remain unresolved from the last two decades, with thousands of seafarers left unpaid or stranded, according to the International Maritime Organization’s own figures.

We disregard the routine stories of fraudulent certification scams, and the lack of support that seafarers get in sifting fact from fiction.

We overlook the flagging standards of flag states, both real and fake, knowing that a growing fleet of more than 100 falsely flagged vessels poses a grave problem to the international system of rules designed to ensure safe and legal shipping.

We fail to mention the institutional negligence of governments reluctant to fully investigate serious maritime casualties, making repeated fatalities inevitable.

We miss out the default criminalisation of crew and masters in cases of pollution.

We omit to discuss the woeful gender imbalance and diversity of a sector that, despite running programmes to address the question for many years, has failed to move the needle in any meaningful way.

And we choose not to talk openly about the way hard-won safety standards that have progressively been built up over decades are in danger of being sacrificed by the unintended consequences of sanctions, which have created a dark fleet of ships outside of the control of regulation.

We are, however, prepared to rail against the lack of external action being taken to protect our seafarers.

Houthi rebels have launched over 60 attacks on merchant ships in the Red Sea, sinking two, seizing another and attacking dozens more.

Attacks on international shipping routes and acts of piracy are unacceptable. Ships and seafarers must not be held hostage and hijacked. Seafarers should not be collateral victims in wider geopolitical conflicts.

Such statements, direct from Guterres today, constitute truths that should be held to be self-evident.

But many of the shipping executives denouncing the repeated attacks on shipping and seafarers are the same people that repeatedly send their vessels and seafarers into the danger zones.

While we collectively mourn the loss of crew members killed in this conflict, the volume of traffic through the Bab el Mandeb remains unchanged.

There will be some sympathy for the International Transport Workers’ Federation’s call for owners and flag states to divert all ships until security can be guaranteed.

The chosen slogan for this year’s Day of the Seafarer is “Navigating the Future – Safety First”. Frankly that formulation could mean just about anything to anyone.

Expressions of solidarity and condemnation don’t save lives. Actions do.

Perhaps it is time to follow World Toilet Day and show that we too give a sh*t.