KARACHI – The local wheat exporters are playing with fire and endangering Pakistan’s reputation as an exporter by chartering vessels which are also used for the transportation of potentially hazardous cargoes like fertiliser and cement.
One such vessel had to wait at least for four to five days at the outer anchorage of Karachi Port after the consignee surveyors declared, what a stevedoring official called, ‘dirty’ hatches unfit for loading the edible commodity. Sources privy to the matter at Karachi Port told Pakistan Today that port authorities had to deny berthing to M/v Reis-G after the surveyors found its color and hatches unsound.
“The surveyors doubted the seaworthiness of the vessel. While its (ship’s) hatches were also dirty,” the sources stressed. They said that before sailing into Pakistan, the wheat ship had offloaded either cement or fertiliser, at another unknown destination. “The ship crew did not leave enough time to get its hatches cleaned,” they asserted.
Sources also claimed that surveyors linked their clearance of the bulk ship to a complete washing and painting of its hatches. “The vessel stayed off the port for last four to five days for want of clearance.” The Karachi Port Trust’s ‘ship-wise cargo handling’ data shows that M/v Reis-G arrived at Berth Number 5 of East Wharf on March 28 and had loaded 6,111 tonnes of wheat during the last 24 hours.
The report indicates that the ship will load a total of 25,300 tonnes of wheat that sources said would be exported to Bangladesh. “All the hatches have been washed and painted satisfactorily and the cargo handling has continued for the last two days,” a stevedore told Pakistan Today. The chartering of such poorly kept vessels that generally carry chemical cargoes like cement and fertiliser is likely to pose a health hazard to end-consumers that will eventually tarnish Pakistan’s reputation as an exporting nation.
Another factor worthy of consideration is the fact that such disputed shipments will be the cost incurred by local exporters running into millions of dollars on account of heavy ship demurrages that on average stand at $15,000 per day at local seaports. Furthermore, such poorly planned hiring of vessels by exporters will impact adversely on concerned stevedoring firms on account of labor charges.
“They (stevedoring company) have been hiring and reliving earlier the working gangs for couple of days in the absence of a ship,” a dock worker from Karachi Port told Pakistan Today. According to KPT data, Friends Corporation Limited (FCL) is the stevedoring company for the said vessel.
Earlier reports suggest that local wheat exporters, who are getting a freight subsidy of Rs 600 per tonne from the governments of Punjab and Sindh, have been sending the exportable commodity to the local ports in ‘unstitched’ sacks that sometimes resulted into a halt in loading on concerned ships for days.
