THE UPS AND DOWNS OF TURN-AROUND TIMES IN LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN CONTAINER PORTS

Over the last decades, year after year, container ports have improved their efficiency. While volumes and port call sizes increased, the time a typical container ship spent in port had slowly but surely continued to decrease. Since the outset of the covid-19 pandemic, however, the tide has turned, and times have significantly increased. Between the first semester of 2020 and the second Semester of 2021, the global median time a containership spent in port went up by 21%.

Among the 32 Latin American and Caribbean economies covered in Table 1, 21 (that is 66%) had seen an improvement, i.e. a reduction, of the time container ships spent in port between the first Semester of 2018 and first Semester of 2020, while thereafter 22 economies (69%) saw an increase towards the second semester of 2021.

The COVID 19 pandemic has led to slower processes in ports and intermodal connections, resulting from lock-downs, port personnel on sick-leave, and frictions caused by the need for social distancing.

The time a ship spends in port is determined by a number of variables, including the efficiency of operation and procedures of government agencies. For example, in some ports, operations still only start after Customs and other officials have physically visited the ship for some paperwork. But also the “call size”, i.e. how many containers are loaded and unloaded during the call, has a bearing on the total time it takes to conclude the stevedoring operations, and larger ships tend to be associated with larger call sizes. Thus, longer turnaround times are not necessarily and indicator of lower efficiency, but at least to some extent also reflect the need for staying longer in port if more cargo is loaded and unloaded.

Empirically, the countries with the lowest turnaround times include those with the largest volumes, as ports in these countries invested in the latest technologies and largest and fastest gantry cranes. But also some of smallest countries record very low turnaround times: if a port only receives one ship every other week, and only a small number of containers are loaded and unloaded, there is no congestion and the time in port can be very low.