Truckers, brokers to protest port congestion

Truckers and broker groups yesterday raised concern over looming port congestion in Manila if international shipping lines would continue to ignore orders to remove their empty container vans from the yards at Port Area.

Aduana Business Club president Mary Zapata said the Integrated North Harbor Truckers Association and broker groups are planning to boycott dealing with four shipping lines by April 1 if they would continue to ignore their demand to immediately remove their empty container vans to free up the container yards.

Zapata said they are referring to several shipping lines, but four cause perennial problems to them, namely APL CMA, TS Lines, Hyundai Shipping and Wanhai Shipping.

“Our problem with these shipping lines is the return of their empty containers. It would take three days before we could return their empty containers and in return we could not use our chassis and our trailer trucks to load new container vans since their empty container vans are still on the chassis,” Zapata said.

She said there are even instances when the Asian Terminals Inc. and the International Container Terminal Services Inc. could not accommodate the empty containers and the truckers would be directed to go to far off outsource container yards hoping they could drop off the empty containers, only to be told after 12 hours of waiting that their yard was already full.

“If by April 1, they would not improve their service, we would no longer carry their container vans. We would boycott these shipping lines,” she warned.

Since last month they have advised their clients not to use these four shipping lines and they should alert their suppliers abroad of this development until such time they come up with a solution.

So far, they have had two meetings with the Association of International Shipping Lines and by Tuesday, they are hoping to get updates on the solution to address the problem.