KARACHI, Jan 16: Slow external trade activities at the country’s three container terminals may wipe out around 5,000 jobs in calendar 2009 amid severe recession in the United States and Europe – the largest trading partners of Pakistan.

Experts on ports and shipping are forecasting 25 per cent drop in handling of boxes at the Karachi International Container Terminal, Pakistan International Container Terminal and Qasim International Container Terminal this year. Last year these terminals combine handled record two million containers.

Capt Anwar Shah, the Governor World Maritime University Malmao, Sweden, observes that the global recessionary trend and slower economic activity at home is bound to curtail imports and exports thereby result in lesser activity and handling of boxes.

Talking to Dawn on Friday, Mr Anwar said that many ports of the world were already faced with such a situation and Pakistani terminals, which only handle captive cargo, could not be an exception.

He said the three terminals were likely to handle no more than l.5 million TEUs in 2009. “The activity at ports is directly linked with economic performance of a country,” he added.

He suggested that the affairs of Ministry of Ports and Shipping should be handled by highly skilled experts who could convert the crisis into an opportunity.

He said Shanghai and Shenzhen ports of China witnessed record fall of six and 15.7 per cent in container volumes last month as manufacturing contracts were cancelled and situation was expected to deteriorate.

He said that Port of Singapore Authority handled 29 million TEUs last year and its global terminals handled 34.2 million TEUs, however the annualised growth figures did not reflect the full story of how dramatically volumes slumped in the latter part of the year.

In view of the worldwide recession, it appears that Port Qasim has rightly decided to defer capital dredging costing $150 million, as Dubai Port World and QICT may not live to their commitment as per new contract to build and make QICT extension berth operational in time.Capt Rasheed Abro has suggested that the government should set up tariff authority to regulate tariff of container terminals.

In India, he said, there is a tariff regulatory authority which regulates 12 major ports. The authority had fixed tariffs in 2006 at private terminals and recently decline APM Nehru gate terminals for increasing handling charges, he added.