Santos to have help from Germany and Spain
Valor Econômico 09/24/10
The Special Secretariat of Ports and the Governments of Germany and Spain are negotiating alternatives of access to the Port of Santos whose projects should be presented by the end of the year. Today, the bottlenecks at the arrival of the port - which generates 26% of the balance of trade - are considered the greatest challenge to be faced by the complex, admitted the Minister of Ports, Pedro Brito, in an event held Wednesday in the city. According to him, among the possibilities is also the creation of tunnels for the transportation of containers.Should the current pace of growth continue, the port of Santos will operate 95 million tons this year. If achieved, the result will exceed in 3 million tons the worst case scenario outlined by a demand study of the Inter-American Development Bank for 2014. That is why the goal of the accessibility plan is to rationalize the cargo transportation matrix that is currently largely concentrated on roads - 85% of everything operated in the port enters or leaves on wheels. Besides that, there is only one entrance for the right margin (Santos), which concentrates 76% of the trucks of the complex. The rest follows to Guarujá.
A slow migration of the goods for the railroad is already underway. According to newly updated forecasts of the São Paulo State Port Company (Codesp), despite the projection of 14.4% of increase in the volumes this year compared to 2009, the increase in the flow of cargo on trucks will be of 3%, adding the 3.2 million trailers. At the same time, the railroad will operate 18 million tons this year, an increase of 20% compared to the previous period. In three years the modal should reach 30 million tons, estimates the Director of Infrastructure and Services of the Port Company, Paulino Moreira Vicente.
While the medium-term projects do not come out of the paper, the Government-owned company announced the implementation, within two months, of a control plan for the arrival of the trucks to the region of Baixada Santista. The idea is to regulate the sending of cargo in the origin according to the capacity available in the terminals in every shipment, aligning the offer and the demand through a database developed by the Brazilian Association of Terminals and Customs Offices (Abtra).
"The investment the Federal Government made in Santos in the last three years cannot even be compared to that made in 30 years in the port. But of course only that is not enough", said Minister Brito. In the first phase of the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC), the Port consumed 13.6% of the R$ 3.6 billion (US$ 2.1 billion) set aside for the segment. Of those R$ 493 million (US$ 281.7 million), nearly 42% was used in the works of the so-called perimeter avenues - group of expressways and overpasses designed to lessen the road and rail junctions and allow more fluidity to the internal traffic. In PAC 2, the government investments planed for Santos have more than tripled and the complex started accounting for nearly 30% of the R$ 5.1 billion (US$ 2.9 billion) foreseen for 21 ports of the country.