Despite Brazil's importance as a leading exporter of agricultural and mineral commodities to the world, the flow of goods through its ports are regularly subject to costly red-tape and delays to rain, strikes or equipment breakdowns.
Brazilian ports are some of the world's most costly to move goods through, according to shipping agents. The center's executive director, Elias Gedeon, estimated Brazilian ports needed 40 billion reais ($23 billion) in investments in new terminals.
"It is an unacceptable absurdity," Gedeon said. "It puts our chain of production at risk."
Centronave said it is still compiling comparative data for the time ships waited in 2009 and should release it next week.
During Brazil's center-south cane harvest this year, ships arriving to load sugar reached unprecedented line-ups of around 135 vessels for several weeks and had to wait up to a month at times to load.
The cost of leaving a ship waiting idle at a port, referred to as demurrage costs, runs around $20,000 to $30,000 a day for a panamax-sized vessel commonly use for dry bulk goods.
Centronave estimates the movement of containers through the port of Santos, Latin America's largest port, rose from 714,000 units in 2001 to 1.74 million in 2008.
Over the same period, the expansion of the port storage area for containers only grew by 49 percent and berthing areas for ships, a mere 6 percent.
"There has been a strong growth in the movement of goods without the corresponding investments needed to handle it," Gedeon said. "The result is a logistic bottleneck that threatens the Brazilian economy at a time when our companies need to be more competitive." (Reuters)
