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SOS: no more space for commodities at ports
Alarm bells have been rung over the commodity jams at ports. If the situation cannot be improved, this will badly affect national economic development.
No room for commodities
Vict, Tan Cang and Ben Nghe ports these days are full of commodities. At Lotus port, the port developer has had to arrange more surface area to keep imported commodities. At Vict, containers are piled in stacks of 6-7. Tan Thuan Dong, Khanh Hoi ports are also full of imported steel and equipment.
Meanwhile, the roads linking the suburb areas of the city and the ports these days are witnessing trucks going back and forth, carrying commodities from the ports to the city. Transport firms say that they have been running at full capacity to meet the demand for carrying imported goods, which has been increasing sharply since Tet.
Meanwhile, Nguyen Ngoc Lu, Deputy Chairman of the HCM City Cargo Transport Association, said that there are not enough vehicles to carry cargo. More than 25 tonne trucks are not allowed to go across Dong Nai Bridge.
Roy Commins, General Director of SPCT port, said that the problems will exist until mid 2009.
According to Portcoast, the consultancy unit for seaport programming, the imports arriving in HCM City’s ports have been increasing sharply in the last few years. Tan Cang port, for example, unloaded 411,627 containers in 2000, while the figure rose to 1.84mil containers in 2007, which represents a 28.4% increase on average. The figures for Saigon port are 237,331 and 385,311 containers, respectively, 122,650 and 572,045 containers for Vict, and 68,421 and 221,119 containers for Phuoc Long ICD. Six big seaports in HCM City unloaded 960,029 containers in 2000 and 3.171 million containers in 2007.
Lacking ports because of bad programming
A lot of reasons have been cited to explain the serious commodity jams; however, the biggest problem is lack of ports.
The Ministry of Transport, when programming seaport system development for HCM City, thought that the ports in the area would receive 26.3mil tonnes by 2010. However, in fact, the volume of commodities going through the ports in 2006 far exceeded the figure, 45.5mil tonnes.
Similarly, the key seaports for the southern region (HCM City, Dong Nai and Ba Ria-Vung Tau) were designed to receive 52.9mil tonnes by 2010, while the ports actually received 52.61mil tonnes in 2006.
A representative of Vict said that the volume of imported commodities has become so great that the city needs to build one new port (like Vict) every year to have enough room to keep containers.
Nguyen Ngoc Hue, Deputy Head of Vietnam National Maritime Bureau, acknowledged that the authors of the seaport development programme, with their limited vision, did not imagine the rapid increases of import commodities.
According to the Ministry of Transport, Vietnam’s seaport system has many general ports and specialised wharfs and few container wharfs, while container transportation has become the main tendency in the world.
Seaport re-programming needed
The Prime Minister has assigned the Ministry of Transport to re-programme seaport system development, allowing the ministry to hire foreign consultants to appraise the programme.
The re-programming will be conducted based on predictions that the volume of commodities going through Vietnam’s seaports will reach 230-250mil by 2010, and 500-550mil tonnes by 2020, an increase of 200% over the previous programme.
Pham Anh Tuan, Director of Portcoast, said that the government needs to offer suitable policies to attract foreign investors. Tuan said that a lot of foreign investors have expressed their desire to develop general or container ports, believing that once the new seaport development programme is approved, there will be a new wave of foreign investment into Vietnam’s seaports.
VNN
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