This year started badly for the ports of Latvia and naturally continues badly. The backlog of the amount of transhipped cargo as a percentage of the indicators of 2022 increases in the course of this year:
In this case, neither the intrigues of local political parties about getting party trustees in the port boards, nor the main intrigue surrounding the renaming of Riga and Ventspils free ports as joint-stock companies, but not renaming the Liepāja Special Economic Zone as a joint-stock company, are of any importance. In maritime terminology, it could be called pushing to the buffet in a sinking ship when there is no hope of escape.
Not to look for culprits among Latvian politicians, civil servants and businessmen is also convinced by the fact that the situation in the ports of our neighboring countries is just as bad. Both Lithuania and Estonia have concentrated sea freight services in one port each, but it turns out that avoiding local competition does not increase the country’s competitiveness in sea freight services.
Poland serves as the international data source created “port overview” for the ten largest ports in the Baltic Sea, in which the Lithuanian Klaipėda is in the 8th position, and Riga is in the 10th position. The report shows that cargo turnover in Klaipėda port in the first half of this year compared to the first half of last year decreased from 18.1 to 16.3 million tons, which corresponds to -9.9%. In Riga, a decrease from 11.3 to 9.6 million tons, which corresponds to the already reported -14.9%. From the point of view of cargo transportation, the Poles do not even mention such a small unit as the port of Tallinn, but Estonians on the port’s website reveal that the amount of cargo in the 6 months of this year compared to the 6 months of last year decreased from 9.5 to 6.6 million tons, which corresponds to -30.6 %. There are also data for the nine months of this year, in which the rate of cargo loss increased by another percentage point.
Encouragement can be found, however, by browsing the performance indicators of the ports, not only this year, but over several years. The data reminds us of the year 2020, the continuation of which trends would have led to the closure of the ports this morning. However, there was no such continuation. Throughout 2021, cargo flow stabilized and 2022 allowed Latvian ports to recover. These changes look like this in percentage terms:
Unfortunately, already throughout 2022, a flattening of the cargo flow was noticeable – a transition from a rapid increase to a more moderate increase, further to a lack of growth and a decrease in the amount of cargo, which for a while was covered by the previously accumulated increase. With the beginning of 2023, the decrease in cargoes became clear, which does not exclude individual surges, if the total cargo flow is considered in divisions by types of cargoes, by ports and by months.
The reduction of cargo in Latvian ports is all the more regrettable because there have been more ships in the Baltic Sea, but they bypass the ports of the Baltic countries. It turns out that it was Russia that stood out with the biggest increase in sea freight. The Polish “port overview” shows the following figures for cargo volume and growth in the largest ports of the Baltic Sea, the list of which is revealed by Ustjluga:
Latvia has to wait for some uncertain changes in the geopolitical situation in terms of time and form after Ukraine’s victory in the war and radical changes in the political situation in Russia and Belarus, and hope that someday it will be possible to use the advantages that Latvia has as the holder of non-freezing ports. Currently, the state of Latvia, with its citizens as taxpayers, is not only the owner of the ports, but also the maintainer, at least in the sense that the ports cannot survive without railways, and the state company “Latvijas dzelzceļš” – without state grants. Current trends will quickly lead to the question of whether the country is ready to invest budget money in ports, and not only donations from European Union funds.
This is the situation in Latvian ports at the time when the underwater gas pipeline “Balticconnector” between Finland and Estonia was damaged on October 8. On October 10, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Defense and Climate of Estonia issued a statement that the damage to the “Balticconnector” was caused by humans. On October 13, Russian President Vladimir Putin called suspicions of Russia’s guilt in blowing up the gas pipeline “complete nonsense”. On October 19, Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs said that if Russia’s guilt was found in the recent underwater infrastructure damage, NATO would have to close the Baltic Sea to shipping.
Unfortunately, the establishment of guilt is not an achievable result in the near future, if we are guided by the fact that nothing has been heard about how far the investigators of the Russian-German underwater gas pipeline “Nord Stream” explosion on September 26 of last year have come in more than a year. Therefore, E. Rinkēvičs can express himself in the form of assumptions without specifying that the closure of the sea means the closure of the Gulf of Finland, which gave its shores to the ports of Ustjluga, Primorska and St. Petersburg.
2023-10-24 02:15:26
#explosions #Baltic #Sea #stop #Russian #ships
