Global Outlaws by Nordstrom Carolyn

Author:Nordstrom, Carolyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2007-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

COMING INTO CAPE TOWN

The cigarettes Okidi sold on the streets of Angola probably came to the continent by ship. So does over 80 percent of the region’s goods. In 2002, when I conducted the interviews below, the seven major ports of South Africa handled nearly 200 million tons of cargo and over 14,000 vessel calls. In addition to bulk cargo like petroleum, timber, and coal, South Africa’s ports handled approximately 2 million containers, or TEUs (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units), as they are called. These are the classic 20 × 8 × 8—foot metal containers that are the foundations of modern shipping. Cape Town handled 6 percent of this cargo, and over 300,000 TEUs.

Bear with me as we work through the following numbers. They will illuminate the illusion of security and the world of smuggling:

– 3,010 vessels arrived in Cape Town in 2002. That’s 250 a month, 58 a week, a little over 8 a day.

– The average small bulk transport ship docking in Cape Town can carry bulk cargo like grains or fertilizers, or 1,000 containers.

– The average container ships carry around 1,700 containers; the sturdier ones, up to 3,000. The large intercontinental ships carry 6,000 containers. New super ships, too big for the Panama Canal, can carry 8,000 to 12,000.

– A typical small ship arrives with 20,000 tons of cargo; a large cargo ship with 120,000 tons. (Legally declared tons, that is. Longshoremen around the world tell me they find single containers overloaded by up to 20 tons.)

To inspect a single container, South Africa National Port Authority representatives must

– bring the ship to berth, assuming one is available;

– bring cranes and stevedores to unload the container;

– put the contents on a vehicle;

– move the container to the container depot;

– make sure sufficient port officials, container depot crew and facilities, and ship or cargo owner’s representatives are present to oversee the opening and inspection of the container; and

– unpack the container in the presence of the importer and the agent.

According to Customs and Excise officials, this work takes four to six hours per container for a cursory inspection. A complete inspection of all the goods inside a container can take over a day. If you figure five hours per container, a typical small ship would require 5,000 hours to have its containers inspected. A large ship would demand 30,000 work hours, which adds up to 1,250 days of round-the-clock work—a total of 3.42 years. Per ship.

In Cape Town, a relatively small port, about 10 ships were now arriving a day. There are 150 Customs and Excise staff in the entire port. What are the odds of them stopping even a tiny fraction of smuggled goods?

The most sophisticated ports in the world can inspect a maximum of only 5 percent of the cargo passing through customs, a figure that South Africa tries to match. One percent of the cargo is stopped at random. In South Africa, officials explained to me that of this 1 percent, they find something wrong with more than a third of them.

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