February 16, 2006	Thursday	Muharram 17, 1427

KARACHI, Feb 15: International Association of Ports and Harbours (IAPH) secretary general Dr Satoshi Inoue said on Wednesday that ports could only face challenges of rapid globalization by fostering strong public-private partnerships.

Speaking at the concluding session of the two-day IAPH Asia Oceania Regional Conference, hosted by the Karachi Port Trust (KPT), Dr Satoshi stressed upon the need of bringing efficiency and higher productivity in port operations to match ever increasing demands of global trade.

“Ports should be active, dynamic and efficient and should work on long-term basis for development and introduce hi-tech in their operations because global transportation heavily depends on ports,” he suggested.

However, he said that this could not be achieved without strong partnership between private and public sectors. “IAPH will always work with ports to share views and ideas meant for development of ports,” he added.

Pakistan International Container Terminal (PICT) chairman Capt Haleem Siddiqui, who chaired the last session of the day, said that the shipping companies were using larger vessels and that kept ports in a difficult situation.

He said that ports could not be developed to cater to the needs of short periods and were usually planned to meet the future demand of up to a half century. Whereas size of vessels and their capacity were being frequently enhanced which demanded berths with deeper draft and sophisticated mechanized equipments.

Consequently, he said that ports were permanently remained under tremendous pressure to upgrade their facilities and infrastructure, which is a capital-intensive exercise.

Chittagong Port Authority chairman A M M Shahadat Hossain deliberated upon the impact of privatization in context of Asian ports, and said that a sea port was not merely an organization that provided a single service, but instead, it provided a synergistic combination of services.

He said that entrepreneurial skills and flexibility of operations of the private sector could make ports operational and profitable which would be beneficial for port development.

Korea’s Busan Port Authority director Boo Wan Kang said that container volume in Northeast Asia had been rapidly increasing and its share in the world’s total container volume would likely to increase from 28 per cent in 2003 to 33 per cent in 2011.

The size of ships, he said, has been growing and container vessels of over 8,000-TEU or 10,000-TEU, called VLCV or ULCV, will be the major fleet and the box ports will have to upgrade their infrastructure to accommodate such huge vessels.

KPT chairman Vice-Admiral Ahmad Hayat thanked the foreign delegates for making the conference a success and said that the five sessions of the two-day conference were extremely rewarding, educative, informative and above all, proved to be a period of concord and cooperation.

He said that in order to meet the strong captive and transit demand of container trade in Karachi, there was an urgent need to develop a new deep draught container terminal.

State Bank governor Dr Shamshad Akhtar, who was the chief guest at the closing ceremony, said that ports by their mere character were a reflection of the progress, organizational strength and prosperity of any country.