The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [203]
The implications of this revolution are profound. Ports around the Indian Ocean rose and fell according to how quickly they provided the facilities needed for container traffic. Colombo was very fast off the mark, and became the hub for all of South Asia in the 1980s. Over the last decade or so Mumbai has built a whole new container port, and Colombo has suffered from this competition. In East Africa Mombasa assumed the same role, handling 1,300 containers in 1975, and no less than 80,100 in 1983. Some totally new ports have appeared. One example is Marmagao, developed to export unprocessed iron ore. In the 1950s it was not a major port at all, but in the 1960s it was ranked third in India in terms of volume of traffic, and second in the 1970s and 1980s, behind only Mumbai.41 In southern Arabia proximity to oil has dictated success. Aden was reduced to very minor significance, and Dubai/Jebel Ali, closer to the oil money, took off.
Southeast Asia provides an excellent case study of the implications of this revolution. Before containers Singapore was far and away the greatest port in the region. The colonial capitals, such as Jakarta, played a regional role. They had connections with the metropole, and were also centres for a dense local traffic handled by smaller steam ships, some owned by Dutch interests and some by migrant Chinese. Traditional craft retained a minor role feeding in to the larger circuits. The situation overall was not positive. Bangkok, for example, was located 30 km up-river, and the bar at the mouth downstream from the city meant only ships with a maximum draft of 16 feet could enter. Dredging in the 1960s increased this to 28 feet, still nowhere near deep enough for the new generation of monster ships. Bangkok was an inefficient port: in 1965 they unloaded 400 tonnes in every 24 hours, while a more competitive rate was about 750 tonnes in eight hours.
The arrival of containers produced major changes, essentially imposed from Europe and the United States, for southeast Asian ports which could not provide the facilities the rich world insisted on were simply bypassed and left to wither. The need was not only for new docks, but more generally intermodal ports which linked road, rail, and ship in one operation. Singapore moved very quickly, and by the 1970s was 'on line'. By 1983 over one-half of Singapore's liner cargo was containerised. Today it is the biggest container port in the world. Other southeast Asian ports followed, and the number of containers loaded and unloaded in ASEAN ports rose from 200,000 TEU in 1972 to 1.1 million in 1978, and 2.5 million in 1983. Singapore acts as a regional hub, along with Colombo, Mumbai, and Hong Kong; about 70 per cent of containers landed in Singapore are trans-shipped. Increasing size means that all these ports have to constantly expand, running fast to stand still just as was the case in the race between engineers a century ago (see pages 211–12). The big container ships today, 6,000 TEU or more, are called post-Panamax, meaning they are too big to go through the Panama Canal, which can only take up to about 3,800 TEU; but economies of scale mean that they are still viable, even though they have to go around Cape Horn.42
The end result is that the 'traditional' Indian Ocean port city, which we have described at different historical times, has begun to disappear. In particular, there are now very few remnants of what used to be the norm, that is