SIMIC

JUNE tonnage declines at the Port of Oakland placed it below the pre-Covid levels of 2019, according to the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association's (PMSA) West Coast Trade Report, reports the American Journal of Transportation,

"Total container traffic year to date through this June (1,012,154 TEU) was 19.3 per cent shy of the mark set during the first half of 2019, which was the lowest number of loads and empties that passed through the port during the first half of any previous year since 2009," said PMSA report.



"In part because of labour slowdowns, inbound loads (66,295 TEU) were down 18 per cent from June 2019. Outbound loads (54,138 TEU) were not only off by 27.7 per cent from four years earlier, but they were also the fewest recorded in any June so far in this century."



In his commentary on the State of the Port of Oakland, which appears in the same PMSA West Coast Trade Report, economist Jock O'Connell said the port faced long-term problems:



"In 2001, Oakland was the nation's fourth busiest container port, trailing only the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach on the west coast and the Port of New York/New Jersey on the east coast," said PMSA economist Jock O'Connell.



Since then, it has been surpassed by the Ports of Savannah, Charleston, Virginia on the Atlantic coast and by Houston on the Gulf Coast. It also trails the volume of container traffic moving through the Northwest Seaport Alliance Ports of Tacoma and Seattle in Washington State, he said.



From previous projections, Port of Oakland volumes should be 1-3 million TEU higher than they are today.



"Oakland has had forecasts, such as one produced just prior to the Great Recession, that anticipated that the port would be handling 5,087,000 loaded and empty TEU by 2020. As the recession wound down, a revised forecast was commissioned that pared those numbers back to 3,427,000 TEU. For those keeping score at home, the port actually handled 2,461,889 TEU in 2020," he said.



"Where does the port go from here? How does it escape devolving into a niche port serving the considerable but still limited international shipping needs of the Bay Area and adjacent areas of Northern California and Nevada?



"Forecasts ultimately rely on fairly broad economic and demographic trends. But the population and economic growth outlooks for the region are fast being revised downward, and an unprecedented series of winter storms may only have forestalled the full impact of a prolonged drought on production agriculture in the Central Valley," Mr O'Connell said.



Oakland's fundamental problem, he said, "is its perilous position in the routes charted by transpacific shipping. It is not a first-call port, although it aspires to become one. At least until Covid, eastbound ships called first San Pedro Bay, where they would disgorge most of their containers. They would then journey up the coast to Oakland, where far fewer TEU would be discharged, before sailing back.



"As the last port-of-call, Oakland did benefit from exporters eager to expedite their shipments, often of perishable agricultural commodities, to the markets of East Asia. For many years that enabled Oakland to boast of being the only major US seaport to export more than it imported."



Mr O'Connell said that more cargo was being sent to ports on the east and Gulf coasts.



"Even if there were shipping lines that could be persuaded a profit could be made by sailing one or two vessel strings directly to Oakland, would that really be enough to alter the reality that Oakland will continue to remain the stepchild of the much bigger Southern California ports, which continue to aggressively vie with Oakland for the agricultural export trade out of the Central Valley and, if ocean carriers cannot be found to offer first-call service, then what?" he said.