PRIVATISING THE PORT

Barely seven months after announcing a $240 million upgrade of the Port of Port-of-Spain as well as complaining of low worker productivity, Government is taking steps to privatise the port. Works and Transport Minister Franklin Khan revealed this week that negotiations were already underway between Government and International Container Terminal Services Inc (ICTSI), with a view to ICTSI’s acquiring a 51 percent shareholding in the port, which only in August of last year declared a 29 percent growth rate in trans-shipment business. Interestingly, Government has received tacit support for its port privatisation plans from an unexpected quarter, said the president of the Seamen and Waterfront Workers’ Trade Union, Mr Michael Annisette.

Mr Annisette challenged not the principle of privatisation, but instead disagreed with foreign ownership of the port, and suggested that any privatisation should be geared towards local ownership. Should ICTSI acquire 51 percent of the Port-of-Port of Spain it would come several years after the port was partly privatised, with private sector interests having control of stevedoring. Later, the ownership and management of the entire operations at the port reverted to Government. Meanwhile, should ICTSI acquire majority shareholding in the port, the company is expected to pump money into its upgrading to facilitate the handling of both freight destined for Trinidad and Tobago as well as trans-shipment cargo.

The $240 million port upgrade plan by Government to provide the port with additional modern cargo handling equipment was one of the strategies to be adopted for the winning of new trans-shipment business, through the faster offloading and reloading of freighters with cargo bound, ultimately, for other Caribbean ports, including ports in South America. There were two factors, however, which needed to be addressed — worker productivity and management style. And last August, it was pointed out that had it not been for the question of relatively low worker productivity, the increase in trans-shipment business would have been higher. The port is in competition not only with Barbados and Venezuela for a greater share of the trans-shipment market, but the Point Lisas port as well.

In addition, the port has had to seek to address the issue of port delays which negatively affected the landed costs of goods and, ultimately, in the case of freight bound for this country, prices on the shelves and racks of supermarkets, haberdashery and hardware stores. Many of the world’s larger ports, whether in North, Central and South America, Europe and the Far East are private sector operated and this has contributed to greater efficiency. In turn, the marked efficiency has led to increased trans-shipment trade for these ports as a result of the effecting of a faster turnaround of freighters calling there, through a speedier offloading of containerised cargo. This has led to a lower landed cost of the trans-shipment cargo and ipso facto lower costs to the consumer — the final measurement of a port’s efficiency.