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.Multinational corporations are now determined to exploitcheap Mexican labor, not so much for manufacturing and assem-bly, but as a means of saving port and transportation costs in theNorth American market.The Plan to Deepen and Widen the Panama CanalThe move to import Chinese goods even goes as far south as Pa-nama.Panama plans to build a deeper, wider Panama Canal inorder to allow Chinese ships direct access to the Gulf of Mexicoand key ports such as Miami, Florida.At present, the Suez Canalis the primary passage for ships from the Far East to reach theEast Coast of the United States.Deepening and widening the Pa-nama Canal would provide the Far East a second option.The shipping industry defines Panamax container ships asthose that are able to fit through the 1,000-feet-long and 110-feet-wide lock chambers of the 92-year-old Panama Canal.21 The Pa-nama Canal allows ships that are a maximum of 965 feet long and106 feet wide.22 Typically, the largest Panamax containerships to-day carry forty-five hundred twenty-foot containers, which is thestandard length.The first generation of post-Panamax container139 THE LATE GREAT USAships carry up to 9800 containers.Today, a new class of super-post-Panamax vessels is under construction.These will carry 12,500such containers.Panama's President Martin Torrijos has decided to put to ref-erendum a $6 billion project to build new locks in the PanamaCanal sufficiently deep and wide to accommodate post-Panamaxships.23 President Bush, while visiting Panama during November2005, supported the plan to expand and modernize the PanamaCanal, a plan then estimated to cost $10 billion.24 Critics such asthe Council on Hemispheric Affairs have argued that the cost ofexpanding the Panama Canal could be as high as $25 billion.25Hutchison Ports Holding, through its subsidiary Panama PortsCompany, operates the ports of Cristobal and Balboa located ateach end of the Panama Canal.26Citing the increasing congestion in West Coast ports, ship-ping industry experts have argued that either the Panama Canalmust expand to accommodate the huge volume of Chinese im-ports or the canal will simply become obsolete.Otherwise, post-Panamax ships containing Chinese goods will be forced to utilizethe Suez Canal to access the U.S.market.In 2003, West Coast ports handled approximately 80 percent ofthe more than $100 billion in goods imported from China.Atlanticports accounted for about 19 percent and Gulf Coast ports pickedup the extra 1 percent.As noted by Michael Bomba of the Centerfor Transportation Research at the University of Texas at Austin,"the volume of Chinese import trade handled by East Coast portshas more than doubled between 2000 and 2003, with the largestjump occurring in 2002, when shippers began to search for alterna-tive routes."27 Shipping industry experts widely regard the Long-shoreman Union's West Coast strike a primary reason importers ofgoods from China have sought to open Mexican ports and a vari-ety of East Coast ports as alternative ports of entry.28Huge Post-Panamax MegashipsThe post-Panamax fleet in service at the end of 2000 consisted ofsome three hundred container ships.29 Experts expect that con-tainer ships with nine to ten thousand container capacity will140 RED CHINA OPENS PORT IN MEXICOsoon dominate main arterial shipping, such as between Chinaand the United States.Ships with twelve thousand and over ca-pacity will be phased into operation between 2009 and 2010.30Super container ships with the capacity to carry 12,500 containershave to be built with twin engines to maintain the twenty-five-knot speed required for a maximum load, which will involve atleast twenty-one containers stacked across the weather deck,31Post-Panamax container ships carrying seven thousand con-tainers require cranes 250 feet tall, equivalent to a twenty-story-tall building.In March 2005, the Port of Oakland, California, in-stalled a second post-Panamax crane that was 241 feet tall, whichthe city described as being "as tall as a twenty-four-story buildingat its apex."32 The $7 million crane was designed with a boomthat can extend to unload ships stacked twenty-three containerswide.The week after the crane was installed, the Port of Oaklandwas expecting one of the world's largest container ships, the eigh-ty-two hundred container "Hugo." The Hugo is able to carryenough cargo "to completely fill a one million-square-foot re-gional shopping center with TVs, toys, clothes, shoes, and otherproducts stacked eight feet high."33Preparing to handle super post-Panamax containerships with12,500 TEU capacity requires reengineering just about every deep-sea port in North America.None of this would be necessary exceptthat it seems the Bush administration plans to continue the workstarted by President George H.W.Bush and Bill Clinton.If theplan were to strengthen manufacturing within the United States,there would be no need for post-Panamax ships and ports withpost-Panamax cranes for unloading.Global shipping companies are working to increase the size oftheir ships in order to achieve economies of scale, thereby reducingtransportation costs.Even goods produced by cheap Red Chineselabor would not be competitive in the United States if transporta-tion costs from Asia could not also be reduced dramatically.Just asChina has sought to capture the world market on cheap labor, sothey are pushing to reduce transportation costs to and within theUnited States to the cheapest levels possible.For the unbridled141 THE LATE GREAT USAcapitalists, the "best" cost of labor and transportation is zero, or asclose to zero as possible.Port of Houston Positions for Post-Panamax TradeJim Edmonds, chairman of the Port of Houston, has said that thePort of Houston is the Gulf port most likely to benefit from theexpansion of the Panama Canal."The Port of Houston has 73 percent of the container market inthe Gulf of Mexico and about 94 percent of the container market inTexas," Edmonds explained."So, it would be logical to assumethat whatever growth in Gulf container traffic that comes from theexpansion of the Canal would most likely come into Texas."A Cambridge Systematics study34 completed in October 2006confirms that the impact of the Panama Canal expansion "will befelt most heavily on and around the Port of Houston, the state'slargest container port and a key trading partner for goodsshipped via the Panama Canal." Cambridge Systematics also do-cumented the move away from West Coast ports, noting that:The Panama Canal's share of total container shipments be-tween Asia and the United States has increased from 11percent in 1999 to over 38 percent in 2004 and containervolumes through the Canal are expected to grow by nearly6 percent annually over the next several years.On February 8, 2007, the Port of Houston opened the BayportContainer Terminal, which was built in anticipation of an ever-increasing volume of container traffic coming through the port.Cambridge Systematics concluded that the Bayport ContainerTerminal "will approximately triple the available capacity forcontainerized traffic at the Port and allow it to more effectivelyhandle Panamax and post-Panamax ships." The $1.4 billion Bay-port Container Terminal, when fully developed, will have sevencontainer berths with the capacity to handle 2 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]