Hormuz crisis: freight traffic down at the ports of Genoa and Ravenna

Moving on to the Adriatic, in Ravenna, total cargo handling for the first seven months of the year rose by +6 per cent (with petroleum products up +18.1 per cent and chemical products down -9.8 per cent), but August saw a 21.2 per cent decline, which drastically reduced growth for the first eight months of the year to +2.5 per cent. The ports of Trieste and Monfalcone recorded an overall increase of 0.67 per cent in goods and 5 per cent in liquid bulk in the first six months of the year; whilst Venice, over the same period, recorded a 0.2 per cent increase in tonnes handled, with liquid bulk down by 11 per cent.

The global geopolitical situation, and in particular that in the Middle East, says Matteo Paroli, chairman of the Port System Authority of Genoa and Savona, ‘certainly has an impact on the port’s traffic. The downward trend in cargo volumes over the first six to seven months of the year is primarily attributable to the decline in traffic from the Middle East. The real risk, however, is not the marginalisation of Genoa but that of the Mediterranean: we must stabilise the situation in the Strait of Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb and the Suez Canal as quickly as possible, because there is a risk that, in the long term, the ports of the Mediterranean may lose their competitiveness to those in Northern Europe’.

But Bruno Pisano, president of the La Spezia and Carrara Local Health Authority, does not share this view: ‘Generally speaking, we’re feeling the effects of the geopolitical crisis here just as everyone else is, particularly due to the operational difficulties faced by the terminals, given that the schedules based on ship arrivals are all being disrupted, as these ships are arriving in a disorganised manner because of the new routes. In short, it’s difficult to get on with our work. But there is too much activity around the Mediterranean for it to be cut off from international routes.” Moreover, between January and August, the 3.3 per cent increase in TEUs recorded by the port of La Spezia breaks down into a 2.1 per cent decrease in containers actually entering the port and a 65.1 per cent increase in those being transhipped onto smaller vessels to reach other destinations. As for Naples and Salerno, according to Eliseo Cuccaro, chairman of the Port Authority, the two ports have so far experienced ‘no negative impact’ from the geopolitical situation. However, he adds, “it must be said that the goods delivered here serve 6 million people living within a 200-kilometre radius of the port”.

The situation in Ravenna is more complex. “There’s a sense of a downturn, of a slowdown,” says Francesco Benevolo, head of the Port Authority. Goods, he adds, “take a longer route, passing through Africa, which means they sometimes stop at northern ports and don’t reach the Tyrrhenian Sea. We are also feeling the impact of the situation in Ukraine, because we used to handle 40 per cent of Italia’s trade with that country, excluding coal and oil.” For the port of Trieste too, says the ADSP’s president, Marco Consalvo, the current geopolitical crisis is “a source of great concern: the port’s figures today are positive, even if they could have been better. We’re not complaining, but we’re taking things as they come; and we hope that the coming months will also confirm, by the end of the year, overall growth of between 3 per cent and 5 per cent.”