Logística dos fretes marítimos: situação confusa, com carências e congestão ao mesmo tempo (Hellenic Shipping News)

  

Hellenic Shipping News, Pireu – 30.5.2022

Container shipping situation worsens due to congestion, delays, and empty containers

 

Supply chain challenges continue to worsen, exacerbated by higher levels of port congestion and shipping delays at ports in Shanghai and elsewhere in China due to Covid-19 lockdowns. Coupled with ongoing congestion at ports elsewhere in the world and low backhaul rates to Asia, container demand is far exceeding capacity.

Congestion at Chinese ports increased in March and April as Covid-19 lockdown measures were introduced in Shanghai and later extended to other parts of the country.Since the beginning of March, total dry bulk congestion levels at ports in mainland China have increased between 30-40%, according to S&P Global Commodities at Sea. The port congestion at Shanghai has showed signs of easing in May, as traffic has been diverted to alternative ports throughout northern and southern China. However, overall congestion levels remain high and longer vessel queues are being seen at alternative ports such as Tianjin and Zhoushan.

Container shipping rates departing Asia also remain significantly elevated over routes inbound to Asia from the US and elsewhere.This differential in freight rates, along with severe delays at ports, has disincentivised carriers from taking shipments from the US, Europe, or elsewhere to Asia, with disproportionate negative impacts for agricultural exports. The most recent Freightos Baltic Index average price on 6 May for a 40-foot container from ports in China/East Asia to North America West Coast was $14,226. In contrast, the 6 May price from ports in North America West Coast to ports in China/East Asia was $991. The average rate from ports in China/East Asia to ports in North Europe was $10,565, compared with $754 in the other direction. The average rate from ports in China/East Asia to ports in the Mediterranean was $12,538, and only $1,528 in the opposite direction.

In the US, tree nuts, produce, and dairy products in California are struggling to find container capacity, according to the California Farm Bureau Federation. Many carriers are no longer stopping at the Port of Oakland, instead opting to send empty vessels directly from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to take advantage of high rates from Asia to the US West Coast. There has also been a general shift in container capacity away from the US West Coast towards the US East Coast. Back in January, The Journal of Commerce reported that shipping companies had increased vessel capacity between Asia and the US East Coast by 25% at the beginning of 2022 compared with the previous year. Shippers increasingly moved to the US East Coast to avoid the now-infamous backlog of ships at the ports of Los Angeles-Long Beach in Southern California.

Port congestion and container capacity has been especially bad in China and the US but remains a global issue. Reuters reports that delays in shipments from China to Europe are subsequently causing shortages of containers to take European goods to the US East Coast. In Chile, the National Union of Fruit Producers (Fedefruta) has called for an action plan to prioritise perishable goods. Products including table grapes, blueberries, and apples and kiwis have been significantly affected by port congestion and transport delays. Transport and unloading between Chile and the port of Philadelphia is reportedly taking as much as 45 days, compared with a normal average of 20 days.

Transport delays in 2021 led Chilean exporters to place greater emphasis on the US market over China, where transport and unloading times are comparatively lower. Some exporters, however, have been able to take advantage of the disruption. For example, Peru saw a 43% y/y increase in fruit, vegetable, and grain exports to China in 2021 as Peruvian exporters filled in the gap left by reduced Chilean supplies.

A key driver of delays and capacity constraints is that many ships are operating at less than full capacity. Ships operating at partial capacity means that more ships are required to move the same volume of cargo. More ships at ports leads to loading and unloading delays. Delays encourage ships to make fewer stops and operate at less than full capacity, and the vicious cycle continues.

In the US, farmers have called on the government to enact measures to quell the practice of ships departing US ports with empty containers. The House and Senate have both passed versions of the Ocean Shipping Reform Act, which would strengthen the authority of the Federal Maritime Commission over ocean shipping companies, including the ability to impose new rules barring carriers from “unreasonably” denying shipments of US exports. The bill is opposed by the World Shipping Council. The House and Senate versions of the bill still need to go through the reconciliation process and will require another vote before becoming law.

The Panama Canal Authority has also proposed a new tolling plan which would for the first time include fees for ships carrying empty containers. The current tolling system has been criticised for being overly complex, and the proposed change is part of a broader effort to make the tolling plan “simple and transparent”, according to Panama Canal Deputy Administrator Ilya Espino de Marotta. The authority said that the new fee on empty containers “recognises the repositioning value of empty containers”.

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Containeres: mais globalizadores do que o livre-comercio

Finance and economics

Free exchange

The humble hero

Containers have been more important for globalisation than freer trade

The Economist, May 18th 2013

THE humble shipping container is a powerful antidote to economic pessimism and fears of slowing innovation. Although only a simple metal box, it has transformed global trade. In fact, new research suggests that the container has been more of a driver of globalisation than all trade agreements in the past 50 years taken together.

Containerisation is a testament to the power of process innovation. In the 1950s the world’s ports still did business much as they had for centuries. When ships moored, hordes of longshoremen unloaded “break bulk” cargo crammed into the hold. They then squeezed outbound cargo in as efficiently as possible in a game of maritime Tetris. The process was expensive and slow; most ships spent much more time tied up than plying the seas. And theft was rampant: a dock worker was said to earn “$20 a day and all the Scotch you could carry home.”

Containerisation changed everything. It was the brainchild of Malcom McLean, an American trucking magnate. He reckoned that big savings could be had by packing goods in uniform containers that could easily be moved between lorry and ship. When he tallied the costs from the inaugural journey of his first prototype container ship in 1956, he found that they came in at just $0.16 per tonne to load—compared with $5.83 per tonne for loose cargo on a standard ship. Containerisation quickly conquered the world: between 1966 and 1983 the share of countries with container ports rose from about 1% to nearly 90%, coinciding with a take-off in global trade (see chart).

The container’s transformative power seems obvious, but it is “impossible to quantify”, in the words of Marc Levinson, author of a history of “the box” (and a former journalist at The Economist). Indeed, containerisation could merely have been a response to tumbling tariffs. It coincided with radical reductions in global trade barriers, the result of European integration and the work of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the predecessor of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Yet a new paper aims to separate one effect from the other. Zouheir El-Sahli, of Lund University, and Daniel Bernhofen and Richard Kneller, of the University of Nottingham, looked at 157 countries from 1962 to 1990. They created a set of variables which “switch on” when a country or pair of trading partners starts using containers via ship or rail (landlocked economies, such as Austria, often joined the container age by moving containers via rail to ports in neighbouring countries, such as Hamburg in Germany). The researchers then estimated the effect of these variables on trade.

The results are striking. In a set of 22 industrialised countries containerisation explains a 320% rise in bilateral trade over the first five years after adoption and 790% over 20 years. By comparison, a bilateral free-trade agreement raises trade by 45% over 20 years and GATT membership adds 285%.

To tackle the sticky question of what is causing what, the authors check whether their variables can predict trade flows in years before container shipping is actually adopted. (If the fact that a country eventually adopts containers predicts growth in its trade in years before that adoption actually occurred, that would be evidence that the “container” jump in trade was actually down to some other pre-existing trend.) But they do not, the authors say, providing strong evidence that containerisation caused the estimated surge in trade.

What explains the outsize effect of containers? Reduced costs alone cannot. Though containers brought some early savings, shipping rates did not drop very much after their introduction. In a 2007 paper David Hummels, an economist at Purdue University, found that ocean-shipping charges varied little from 1952 to 1970—and then rose with the cost of oil.

Put them in a container

More important than costs are knock-on effects on efficiency. In 1965 dock labour could move only 1.7 tonnes per hour onto a cargo ship; five years later a container crew could load 30 tonnes per hour (see table). This allowed freight lines to use bigger ships and still slash the time spent in port. The journey time from door to door fell by half and became more consistent. The container also upended a rigid labour force. Falling labour demand reduced dockworkers’ bargaining power and cut the number of strikes. And because containers could be packed and sealed at the factory, losses to theft (and insurance rates) plummeted.

Over time all this reshaped global trade. Ports became bigger and their number smaller. More types of goods could be traded economically. Speed and reliability of shipping enabled just-in-time production, which in turn allowed firms to grow leaner and more responsive to markets as even distant suppliers could now provide wares quickly and on schedule. International supply chains also grew more intricate and inclusive. This helped accelerate industrialisation in emerging economies such as China, according to Richard Baldwin, an economist at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. Trade links enabled developing economies simply to join existing supply chains rather than build an entire industry from the ground up. But for those connections, the Chinese miracle might have been much less miraculous.

Not only has the container been more important than past trade negotiations—its lessons ought also to focus minds at future talks. When governments meet at the WTO’s December conference in Bali they should make a special effort in what is called “trade facilitation”—efforts to boost efficiency at customs through regulatory harmonisation and better infrastructure. By some estimates, a 50% improvement in these areas could mean benefits as big as the elimination of all remaining tariffs. This would not be a glamorous outcome, but the big ones seldom are.

^Sources

^{"Estimating the Effects of the Container Revolution on World Trade", by Daniel Bernhofen, Zouheir El-Sahli and Richard Kneller, Lund University, Working Paper 2013:4, February 2013}

^{"Transportation Costs and International Trade in the Second Era of Globalisation", by David Hummels, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21(3): 131-154, 2007}

^{"Trade And Industrialisation After Globalisation's 2nd Unbundling: How Building And Joining A Supply Chain Are Different And Why It Matters", by Richard Baldwin, NBER Working Paper 17716, December 2011}

^{Economist.com/blogs/freeexchange}