East Africa stalemate for carriers and shippers

Carriers servicing East Africa need consistently higher volumes to warrant more dedicated services – despite the rise in oil and gas exploration. According to Pamela Yerushalmy, commercial executive at Fairseas International, decision-making around the movement of oil and gas cargo is often lastminute, one of the contributing factors to the lack of carriers into places like East Africa. “We need to see an increase in volumes on a more regular basis that is not based on lastminute decision making,” she said. Pascal Ochquee, regional logistics manager for Europe and sub Saharan Africa at Halliburton International, sees it as a chicken and egg-type situation. “Understandably there must be more volumes and better planning of schedules for shipping lines to call more regularly, but the argument goes the other way as well. If there were more shipping lines calling regularly, then planning would be easier and volumes would increase.” But, warned Reynold Pinto, manager oil and energy Sub-Saharan Africa, DHL Forwarding, there is no easy solution to the problem as there is little room for planning in the oil and gas industry. “The oil and gas sector is never going to be a planned scenario like the food supply chain where you have schedules and you know where you are going and when you are doing it and you do it at the same time every week.” He said it was not a fivepallets- of-cargo-once-a-weekon- a-Thursday environment. “The oil and gas sector by its very nature is unplanned, last minute and uncontrolled.” Pinto said with the amount of exploration in East Africa there was a need for carriers to call more regularly as they would ultimately benefit as volumes were on the increase. “One is never going to be able to control the supply or the demand in the oil and gas sector. It is very difficult to determine and plan if you have no idea what the volumes and tonnages are, and it will never be different. One has to learn to work around these aspects of the sector.” The carriers, however, maintained that shipping was just too costly a business to run vessels to ports on the off chance that there would be cargo. “Planning is at the very heart of successful shipping,” said Yerushalmy.