The government has promised to increase productivity and reduce bureaucracy in ports — but its projects are sinking
São Paulo – A common image during the harvest season has become a symbol of the infrastructure deficiencies that delay the expansion of foreign trade: the queues, on the roads close to the ports, of soy trucks waiting for their turn to unload.
In an attempt to reduce the bottleneck, in April of last year the government determined that the inspectors from six bodies involved in releasing cargo — including the Federal Revenue Service, the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) and the Ministry of Agriculture — work day and night in the eight main ports of the country.
For the system to work, the six bodies have to provide the service non-stop — the lack of only one of them prevents the dispatch of the goods. The intention of the measure, named Porto 24 Horas, was good. In practice, however, after more than a year, little has changed.
One of the reasons why the program did not succeed is the lack of personnel — the government ordered the agencies to extend the working hours, but did not authorize hiring to reinforce the staff. In the Santa Catarina port of Itajaí, the sixth in the country in container movement, there are two agricultural inspectors to inspect vegetable products, and it would take at least three times that number.
In Santos, it is estimated that Anvisa would have to hire 30 inspectors in addition to the current 22 — the agency closes at 5 pm the sanitary inspection of ships, without which some of them are not authorized to unload. Vessels not inspected by that time must stay overnight in port.
Losses with delays exceeded 36 million reais from June 2013 to April this year, according to the accounts of the Union of Maritime Navigation Agencies of the State of São Paulo. The lack of planning in the implementation of the program is evident.
In a note, the Special Secretariat for Ports of the Presidency of the Republic argues that there are public bodies that do not work 24 hours a day because it was found that there is no demand for night shifts.
The question: don't companies try to release goods outside business hours because they don't want to or because inspectors aren't there to provide the service?
It is not the only frustrated government initiative in the ports. Another example is Porto sem Papel, launched in 2011 with the promise of replacing hundreds of documents with a single system over the internet.
Three years later, the project was not completed and the information from the Federal Revenue had to be forwarded separately, in a separate system.
“This forces us to provide practically the same information twice”, says Julian Thomas, superintendent of the German carrier Hamburg Süd in Brazil. “Bureaucracy remains an obstacle.”
In the last harvest, the queues for trucks in Santos dropped by half — in part because the port administration began to require carriers to schedule the loading time of each trailer. The performance of the ports, however, deteriorated.
According to a study by the World Bank, from 2012 to 2014 the average time it takes for a load to be released went from five to eight days, which puts Brazil ahead of Algeria, Venezuela and Gabon among 110 countries. Porto 24 Horas and Porto sem Papel need to stop being just good intentions.
Source: Exam
By: Flavia Furlan
