A spoke in the wheel

‘Us’ being you, dear reader, and I, and anyone else with a career in this business. ‘Them’ being anyone outside that magic shipping circle.

So, a chance conversation with a friend in the printing industry served as a stark reminder that that boundary is virtually undetectable; just because we live and breathe shipping doesn’t mean that everyone else isn’t affected by the day-to-day goings on in the maritime world.

My paper-buying pal was bemoaning two maritime incidents which were making his job hard at the moment. First, he criticised striking dockers in Finland, who unwittingly forced the closure of newsprint and pulp mills. Finland exports about 1.5m tonnes of pulp annually.

The strikers walked off the job on March 4, only to return on March 19 after a new wage deal was struck. But as we know two weeks of hampered exports is more than enough to cripple a country’s exporting potential and reportedly cost industry a staggering €1.5bn ($2bn).

This is lesson one in the importance of ports to the man on the street. Lesson two is a natural, rather than man-made phenomenon.

Back to the paper-buying trail and my chum moves to his second port-related tale of pulp woe. Chile, I have since learnt, accounts for a whopping 8% of the world supply of pulp. And since an earthquake devastated the country on February 27, six of the nation’s pulp mills have been shut – representing nearly 90% of Chile’s worldwide supply.

Of course, the shut mills are only half the problem: while the Chilean port of Valparaiso escaped relatively unscathed, ports closer to the quake epicentre at Concepcion are struggling to return to form. At Talcahuano, berths 1 to 3 totally collapsed and major cracks have appeared in paving material. San Vicente Port has to contend with the collapse of many of its terminal access ways. Lirquen harbour’s berth 1 is said to be unusable and Coronel’s general cargo terminal sustained some damage.

The reinstatement of those pulp mills will need to be completed in line with port restoration works otherwise the inevitable choke point will occur once everything is back to normal.

Of course, the upside of these events is that one man’s misfortune is another’s gain, with ports handling pulp in other countries working around the clock to make up the shortfall. Canada’s pulp producers, for one, are expecting to benefit from increased prices. No doubt producers in the US, Sweden and Brazil are singing from the same hymn sheet.

To bring all this back to the print company paper buyer, his gripes remind me that we ought not view what we do in the ports industry in isolation. There is always someone close to home that relies on a fully-functioning, streamlined ports business to make their job easier.