It's a quiet time for trade right now
IT IS now the normally quiet time for trade with Angola - and there is still little sign of whether the civil war/unrest (call it what you will) has had any downward effect on SA dealings with the country.
Peter Meihuizen, of Meihuizen Freight - SA agents for the Angola South Line - describes the current situation as very much as you were - although he also professes to have had little more hard news out of Angola than the average SA newspaper reader.
It will be having an effect, he said, but this is not the time to hazard any estimates - as it's generally quiet at this time of the year anyway.
Angola South has just sailed a ship on the trade - Running about three-quarters full, according to Meihuizen.
But we'll have to wait till our next voyage until we can possibly make any sort of judgement, he added.
John Covey, co-owner of groupage specialists, Export Consolidation Services - and with regular volumes of consolidations heading for Angola - agrees.
Although it is very quiet at this stage, we were sending groupages up there until the end of the Xmas shopping period, he said. We also hear from one customer that they are still shipping reasonable quantities of FCLs (full container loads) to Luanda.
I only know what I have been reading in the press, so I don't really know what is going to happen over the next few months - when trade should pick up again.
Meihuizen feels that trade with Angola - much of it being basic perishables, other foodstuffs, and aid cargoes - is almost all necessities. And the country would be hard pushed to drop its off-take much lower, without entering a starvation scene. The cash for the imports - largely generated from Angola's coastal oil wells - is also still flowing, and the new war is doing little to reduce this necessary income.
The war, he added, is also still largely confined to the east and south-east of Angola, and the bulk of the trade is to the MPLA-controlled coastal area.
At the height of the last civil war, the strife never really got to the coastal cities, he said. We have been continuing as normal, and taking advice from our principals in Angola.
There appears to have been little change in Luanda, according to our sources.
