KARACHI, Nov 13: The foreign shipping lines have agreed to immediately reduce war risk premium (WRP) by 75 per cent which would mean that exporters will now have to pay only $46 per TEU container, official sources said here on Tuesday.
All the foreign shipping lines reporting at country’s ports had to impose war risk premium in the last week of September after the underwriters started to charge from them WRP at the rate of 0.25 per cent depending on a haul value of a ship.
According to a message received by Export Promotion Bureau (EPB) here on Tuesday, the foreign shipping lines have reduced war risk premium from 0.25 per cent to 0.05 per cent with immediate effect.
As a result of this the shipping lines had to charge $185 per TEU from exporters. The government took the matter at diplomatic level and sought immediate withdrawal of the charges unilaterally imposed by the underwriters without any justification.
Pakistan’s envoy to United Kingdom took the matter with Lloyds in London and tried to convince the underwriters that since no war was going on there stands no justification for imposing such charges which are damaging to country’s external trade of $20 billion.
However, the parleys materialized into sending a team of Lloyd’s representatives to see the situation on ground. Early this month a three-member Lloyds team came to Pakistan to personally inspect the security and other facilities of the sea ports of the country.
On the return the team members gave positive report about the country’s ports (Karachi and Port Qasim) which helped to reduce the WRP by 75 per cent or by $139 per TEU.
As per now the underwriters would now only be charging 0.05 per cent of haul value of a ship but efforts are being made to altogether eliminated these charges particularly in front of fast changing situation in Afghanistan.
The two major ports of the country — Port Qasim and Karachi Port — annually handle around 700,000 TEUs. Similarly, around $3.5 to $4 per ton was being extra paid towards war risk premium on bulk cargoes.
