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It
has come to the point where we casually
accept that on the waterfronts of the developed
world a situation exists in which freight
handlers are paid US$145,000 a year - more
than double that paid to courtroom prosecutors,
FBI agents and resident doctors at US hospitals,
who are paid between $60,000 and $65,000.
Environmentalists
and their regulatory allies are even more
serious barriers to progress in that they
are permanently on the warpath to stop any
transport expansion. Hamburg now awaits
a Leipzig court judgment in October before
if knows if it go to the next step in the
dredging process of the River Elbe to allow
megaships in its harbour.
Recently,
Savannah harbour received go ahead from
the US Army Corps of Engineers to start
dredging its channel to the sea so it could
accommodate larger ships - after 16 years
of studies and litigation with environmental
lobbies.
Which
brings us the regulatory community and its
allies, including in the United Nations,
which appears to govern far more than many
would think. They do this through amendments
to motherhood treaties member states signed
decades ago, but now acquire penal teeth
through a civil service process without
legislative debate.
Thus,
we passively accept things like "carbon
footprints" and various crimes and
misdemeanours, which few understand and
fewer question, on the basis that some expert
somewhere knows why it is so, and it must
be because it is against the law.
Much
of this is based on the official belief
in "global warming", which morphs
itself into "climate change" whenever
it turns cold. Whether you believe in global
warming, it must be conceded that officialdom
was consumed with fears of global cooling
in 1970s, then headlined as the "New
Ice Age". Like all eco-predictions,
they don't come true, but rely on the distraction
of a fresh dire new prediction to divert
attention from the failure of the old one
to materialise. The proof of the new dire
prediction lies safely off in the future.
So
many costs lead back to climate change,
or global warming from clean trucks programmes,
forcing owner-operators off the docks turning
them into employees, more readily unionised
by the Teamsters union. All adding to costs
and narrowing the realm of freedom of choice.
There
are all sorts of groups threatening to stop
practices for the good of people who freely
and willingly engage in them, like shipbreaking
in India and Bangladesh, or electronic waste
salvage in China. These must suffer the
lobbying efforts of the Basel Action Network
(BAN). BAN wants to ban work in conditions
they cannot improve until such time as improved
conditions can be provided.
The
rising tide of regulation has banned several
Indonesian ships from Australian ports for
failing to have "effective passage
planning and use of appropriate charts and
publications". Such are the offences
these days that ended three of Meratus Line's
ships trade to Australia as the number of
hoops on which regulators insist on increase
exponentially.
There
is growing affluence in the world, but it
is not at a level of Europe and North America.
To be exploited, the price of goods must
come down to a level where these newly and
barely affluent customers can afford them.
And it is up to container shipping to make
it so.
This
is where lower slot costs and lower freight
rates are part of the new normal. But that
must be coupled with lower longshore costs
to start with, and a full investigation
into regulatory and sundry costs which must
also fall by the wayside.
What
shipping lobbies must do is to make demands
for mandatory cost-benefit analyses on the
impact of new rules and regulations about
to be imposed as well as well as studies
done on the costs and benefits of rules
an regulations have already been imposed
with a view to their reduction and/or elimination.
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