Maritime transportation is the most economical mode for mobilizing

Maritime transportation is the most economical mode for mobilizing raw and finished products in bulk. While the dynamics of economics were changing with ‘globalization’ and countries were opening their closed-door policy, the shipping industry stood and supported the changes by rendering the best services to the world. Today, the industry is being threatened of being used by discriminators to fulfil their malicious desire. Government is determined to have world class transportation systems, logistics and facilities for the sustainable growth of Mauritian economy.

To this end, it is investing massively for the infrastructural development of the Port Louis Harbour into a preferred maritime hub offering a spectrum of associated services in the Indian Ocean. The Prime Minister, Minister of Home Affairs, External Communications and National Development Unit and Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Mr Pravind Kumar Jugnauth, made this statement today at the official launching of the Mauritius Maritime Week 2018 (MMW) at the Ravenala Attitude Hotel in Balaclava. The MMW, the Prime Minister underlined, is set to showcase the Port-Louis Harbour as an integrated platform for five main sectors, namely, container transhipment, bunkering, cruise tourism, seafood and ancillary port services.

Over the last 50 years, Mauritius with its strategic geographical location has been able to transform itself into an important maritime logistics as well as a transport hub, he emphasised. Concerning the quay extension project, Prime Minister Jugnauth recalled that it has enabled to position Mauritius as a full-fledged transhipment hub and major shipping lines have already expressed their interest to increase their container transhipment volumes.

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He highlighted that other major projects namely the development of the Riche Terre Special Economic Zone, an Island Container Terminal at Mer Rouge and a Cruise Terminal building, amongst others, are in the pipeline. The Port Louis Harbour, Prime Minister Jugnauth pointed out, will undoubtedly become the fastest growing sector of the ocean economy and will have a leading role to play in the coming years.

The opportunities for Mauritius to put itself as a nation maritime nation is that, They lower the costs of trade, generate value added and employment and attract certain economic sectors.

Doubling port efficiency of two countries is found to increase their bilateral trade volume with 32% as indicated by an earlier study. One tone of port throughput is on average associated with USD 100 of economic value added, and an increase of one million tonnes of port throughput is associated with an increase in employment in the port region of 300 jobs in the short term. Moreover, ports are associated with innovation in port-related sectors. Nine out of the 10 world regions with the largest amount of patent applications in shipping are home to one or more large global ports. However, a lot of these benefits from ports spill over to other regions. Firms in other regions also benefit from efficient ports when exporting and importing, and links with other sectors mostly take place outside the port region. Less than 5% of the economic linkages with suppliers take place in the port region, with a larger share in the main economic Centre of the country, which could be relatively far away from the port, e.g. Ile-de France for the ports of Le Havre and Marseille; and Bavaria and Baden W?rttemberg for the port of Hamburg. Ports also have negative port impacts, mostly related to the environment, land use and traffic congestion. These impacts can be very substantial; e.g. more than half of the SO2-emissions in Hong Kong is related to shipping, and a third of the land surface of the city of Antwerp consists of its port. In addition, port truck traffic accounts for more than 85 % of total truck traffic on some sections of the highways in Los Angeles. Most of these negative impacts are localized, taking place close to the port area (in terms of noise and dust) and in the metropolis (for air emissions, water quality, congestion and land use). This represents what can be called the port-city mismatch: the combination of benefits spilling over to other regions and localized negative impacts. How to solve this mismatch? Evidently, the port needs to be competitive if cities want to benefit from it. Port-related value added and employment is strongly related to urban wealth. Ports can be made more competitive by strengthening their maritime links, port operations and hinterland connections. Local goodwill for port functions in cities is essential and can be earned. Environmental policies and incentive schemes have reduced a variety of environmental impacts, transport policies in and around ports have mitigated congestion and port relocations have freed up centrally located urban land for other functions. However, the key issue is how to get more local value for money out of ports.

Having in mind that more than the 90 % of world merchandise is moving through the seaway , the “maritime & port” logistics chain represents one of the most important nodes of the global supply chain .

Ships, given the diversification of goods , with the rise of the container, allow to extend logistics beyond the port , and not only from port to port , but door to door , this change of concept , together with the big volume transported, let the marin transportation as the cheapest mode of transport, and also, according to studies conducted in the European Union , is the mode of transport that produce less pollution, so, this is a node of the supply chain with great importance and validity . In the Faculties of nautical studies and maritime transport , as well as schools of logistics and international maritime commerce , we study all the details, implications , extensions and all issues related to maritime logistics , which of course is not isolated, as a node belongs to a large supply chain , but , like all international activity is subject to a number of laws , regulations, etc. ; and the combination of different professions , from those who work on ships and in port until all other stakeholders in the maritime logistics , having in mind that came frm a diverse nature.

Nevertheless, Port impacts have generally become sub-urbanised, as many port sites have relocated from city centres. Port relocations and gradual spatial disintegration of ports and cities over time have taken place in many countries and have had a profound influence on port impacts. Remaining port functions near highly populated areas have become constrained by limited acceptance by the population of negative impacts. However, there is a large variety between port-cities. As ports are capital intensive, port relocations can in many cases not immediately take place and have in many cases been a gradual shift, through new terminal development away from city development. Several ports have thus developed on multiple sites, which adds a new layer of complexity in terms of disintegration of positive and negative impacts. Port lay out also is important, as the boundary of the port area with the city could be considered the area were most of the environmental impacts take place. If this boundary touches a large population concentration, the intensity of port impacts will evidently be larger. Finally, there is also a governance component to this discussion, when most of the impacts touch surrounding municipalities, which would imply a metropolitan or regional approach to these impacts.. The effects of pollution, dust and noise are all very localised and most of the congestion costs occur close to the ports. Other regions are also subject to the negative impacts of the hinterland transport of port cargo to or from their region, but these effects are more diluted than the impacts in the port-city. Moreover, there is a large skewedness with respect to the negative impacts; large port-cities can be considered environmental hotspots. According to our estimates the largest 25 ports in the world account for around half of the shipping

emissions in all ports in the world (Merk, 2012). So there is a large difference in negative port-city impacts depending on port size. Other environmental impacts from shipping are evidently global impacts, and many of these actually take place at sea, but these impacts become particularly evident in port-cities.

Providing facilities and services to attract international shipping lines is expected to reduce freight rates for shippers. This in turn will promote coastal shipping, transshipment in the region ports and will lead to diverse and more competitive maritime transport services and at the same time expands the East African Coast Countries and Madagascar’s feeder port network. Furthermore, this will encourage traders from Madagascar and the Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) region which borders the south western Indian Ocean region, to make greater use of maritime transport, especially for the transport of food and household goods producing economies of scale and lower transport unit costs. The Project provides potential for countries of the region to diversify their economies, increase their export base, develop their infrastructures, and increase their underexploited intra-regional trade. In short, it will promote sustainable economic growth focused on inclusive development. Sustainable development of the maritime transport sector will provide increased employment and increase technical skills and experience.