New Briefing Paper Gives Supply Chain Managers Overview of U.S. Seaport Options

When Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles (POLA) hosted a video conference yesterday for the trade press, he admitted that current trade policies would keep volumes down by double digits for the foreseeable future.

But John McLaurin, President of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association (PMSA), says that the outlook is far more complicated than that.

“The decline in cargo volumes represents the jobs lost throughout the economy due to the COVID-19 crisis,” he says. “Restoring those jobs in California when this crisis passes will require not only investing in infrastructure and technology but also examining policies that drive up costs at California ports. Otherwise, California risks having shippers select other lower cost gateways when the crisis does pass.”

A briefing paper prepared by economist Jock O’Connell contains a detailed account of just how formidable the challenges all West Coast ports face in the coming years.

To highlight the current plight of U.S. West Coast (USWC) ports, here are some of the more discomforting of the latest numbers:

+352,846. That was the increase from 2018 to 2019 in inbound loaded TEUs through the nine East Coast ports the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association (PMSA) monitors.

+80,292. That was how many more inbound loaded TEUs the two Gulf Coast ports we monitor (New Orleans and Houston) handled in 2019 than in the previous year.

“The governments of West Coast states have been less than assertive in bolstering the physical infrastructure needed to support international trade,” says Jock O’Connell. “While there has been a productive market for consultants’ reports detailing the economic value of such things as designated trade corridors, there has been relatively little in the way of concrete investment or policy measures aimed at facilitating international goods movement. By contrast, other states have not been neglecting the material needs of their ports.”

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