According to Codesp, in April 2014 the rate of vehicles that completed the period scheduled to arrive at the port reached 67%.
Brasília – The average length of stay for trucks at the Port of Santos dropped from 9,25 hours to 5,5 hours between April last year and the same month this year.
The data is from the Companhia Docas do Estado de São Paulo (Codesp).
According to Codesp, also in April 2014, the rate of vehicles that completed the period scheduled to arrive at the port reached 67%.
When the scheduling, adopted in January to reduce congestion, began to take effect, this percentage was 23%.
According to the Minister of Transport, César Borges, there was also a reduction in the cost of freight compared to 2013.
"Not only did queues end, but there was a 10% reduction [in the cost] of freight because you organized this outflow logistics", declared the minister, in a joint press conference with the Special Secretariat for Ports and the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply for data presentation.
In 2013, the departments formed a working group to solve bottlenecks in the flow of the crop, as there were losses due to queues and slowness.
According to Luis Cláudio Santana Montenegro, director of Planning at Codesp, the problem is under control this year.
“We had no chronic problems with queuing. Some contingencies were resolved in a matter of hours,” he said.
The scheduling system is only used in the Port of Santos, for the time being.
Vehicles have a window of six hours to reach the port, with a tolerance of five hours, due to the long distance most have to travel.
According to the Minister of the Special Secretariat for Ports, Antonio Henrique Silveira, scheduling, which in the first four months helped mainly in the sale of soybeans, the main product shipped, will continue to be used.
“There will be a peak of sugar movement in the coming months, then [will come] the second corn crop. That system is going to be enhanced, not disabled,” she said.
Silveira did not rule out the possibility of the system being used in other Brazilian ports.
César Borges pointed out that, in addition to the improvement in flow through Santos, other factors are contributing to smoother shipments of the crop.
“This year there was the most intense use of the railroad. There was [also] an impact that favored the decrease in the corn crop [due to climatic factors]”, he commented.
According to the National Supply Company (Conab), the corn harvest, which last year was 81 million tons, this year should reach 78 million tons.
Borges also highlighted that there was an outflow through the Port of Miritituba (PA), which should be increasingly used due to the lower cost of logistics.
For the Minister of Agriculture, Neri Geller, “it is evident that the flow worked very well [in 2014] compared to last year”.
According to him, the Secretariat of Ports and the Ministry of Transport responded to the portfolio's demand, which requested better logistical conditions.
In a joint note from the ministries, the federal government highlighted that the measures to improve the flow of the crop involved the scheduling and inspection system on the highways close to Santos, the release of credit for the construction and renovation of warehouses and investments in highways such as the BR-163 , in Pará, which received funds from the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC) and had two stretches granted for exploration by the private sector.
Source: Exam
By Mariana Branco, from Agência Brasil
