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With their war
cry "Keep it on the Water!" the Savannah salesmen first persuaded
importers and then poultry exporters to adopt the port permanently to connect
with Asia. They pointed out that there seemed to be little point in hauling
freight thousands of miles overland to the eastern US, where 80 per cent of
American consumers live, when they could 'keep it on the water' and spare themselves
costly intermodal transfers.
After a year or
two of beating this drum, Savannah port boosters found that their Asian cargo
volume grew faster than LA-Long Beach's after the lockout and they had developed
something rare in the container business - a balanced trade with the same number
of boxes going in and out.
Back then, in
2007, with the exception of the 14,000-TEUer Emma Maersk, most transpacific
ships fit the 4,500-TEU panamax limit. True, the Panama Canal Authority was
well into its expansion programme to more than double its capacity so that 13,000-TEUers
could transit.
But by then, 14,000
and 19,000 TEUers, too big to not fit into the expanded Panama Canal when it
at last will open in 2016, were already plying the oceans with 24,000-TEUers
on the drawing boards if not on the orderbooks.
These developments
came with the global downturn that spawned an obsession with cost-savings as
new mega ships flooded the market, raining down unwanted oversupply and depressing
rates. But there were benefits too, as screaming greenies, who beset the industry,
inavertently pointed to ways of cutting bunker burn through slow steaming with
streamlined eco-hull coatings as well as spawning fuel efficient engines to
accompany their new demands.
Of course, bigger
ships with smaller crews, cut container slot costs as long as you could get
the slots filled.
And that's where
luckless Egypt came in with its single piece of good fortune - the lockless
Suez Canal that could take any ship afloat and conduct it through the Red Sea
to the Med. Typically, the mega ships were were on the way to the European northern
range ports as described earlier. But with the EU economy in the dumpster, it
was hard to fill all the slots in the ever-more numerous, ever-larger ships.
Partial rescue
came from the want-for-nothing oil-rich Gulf States of Arabia, which was consuming
consumables at expotential rates. Then, bit by bit came growth from Med port
hinterland as container terminals were privatised and became more efficient,
making goods more cheaply and thus more widely available. Cosco Pacific's modernisation
of Pireaus port near Athens was paying off to the point where it made a US$286
million investment to nearly double its capacity.
Then there were
the feeders to and from now-oil and commodity rich West Africa where trade is
booming from wayports like Malta, Valencia, Algeciras and Tangiers, which handled
goods to and from West Africa, just as Jeddah and Aden did in the Red
Sea and Salahlah did from Oman for an ever-more affluent east Africa.
Two years ago
there were only 4,500-TEU WAFMAX geared vessels working the West African coast,
but these days, gearless 5,000-TEUers account for 20 per cent of the trade.
Recently, the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) recently announced calls
by its 6,000-TEUers.
The MSC ships
will be based on a single hub of Togo, the Lome Container Terminal, where Hong
Kong's China Merchants together with Terminal Investment Limited (TIL), an MSC
affiliate, have stakes.
A network of feeders
operating along the West Africa coast and further afield will operate in conjunction
with the terminal similar to how they function with hubs such as Italy's Gioa
Tauro or Malta.
China without
colonial baggage of the west to hinder its efforts has been building roads,
rail and port infrastructure as well as acting as the turn-key investor on mega
projects from the Cape to Cairo. Major terminal operators, Maersk's AP Moller
Terminals, Manila's ICTSI, and Dubai's DP World to name a few, are making things
work in Africa with new container facilities, with London's Drewry Maritime
Research saying West Africa, North Africa and greater China will be the fastest-growing
regions for terminal operators.
Terminal operators
made goods come in the out affordably and the more affordable they became, the
more they were purchased, and the more goods to-ed and fro-ed - creating the
usual virtuous circle that has been the hallmark of the container revolution
since the beginning.
This latest development
was called "wayporting", that is, dropping off boxes and picking up
others. Dropping off what was bound for Africa, intra-Med/Black Sea ports, and
more importantly at this stage, what was bound for east coast the Americas,
both North and South.
At the northern
end, the Port of Montreal, for example, accounted for its increase in growth
because of Far East cargo that came through the Suez Canal via the Med, and
it was much the same for ports along the east coast of South America. Today,
hardly a major US port does not mention this non-traditional Suez source of
cargo as growing proportion of its total volume.
Ever since mankind
took to the seas to conduct international trade, the Mediterranean, as its name
"middle earth" implies, has been at the centre. Lately, though, it
has become a stretch of maritime highway on the way to somewhere else. But with
changes in the global shipping environment, the Med is fast growing into a new
and more important role what one day may fairly be called, the hub western world.
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