9,000 goods containers held up for months by Pakistani officials

As Pakistan’s trade with Afghanistan continues to decline another problem has reared its head – that of about 9,000 containers loaded with goods worth more than $400 million stuck at Pakistani ports. 

Bloomberg reported Monday that these containers have been held up for about five months. There are two reasons for this, the report stated. 

Firstly customs officials are screening all the cargo instead of the five percent they used to check before the COVID-19 outbreak and secondly because not all trucks have GPS trackers – which are mandatory to stop theft and to ensure the containers don’t go missing along Taliban controlled routes. 

However, the company tasked to install trackers refuted these claims. 

Ghulam Nayab, commercial consular at the Afghanistan consulate in Karachi told Bloomberg that “transit consignments that landed in June are still lying at Karachi port,” said Nayab.

South Asia Pakistan Terminal, the nation’s biggest and deepest container terminal, alone has a backlog of 1,600 boxes, according to Rashid Jamil, chief executive officer of SAPT, a unit of Hutchison Port Holdings.

This, according to Bloomberg, is eroding Pakistan’s trade surplus to Afghanistan even further as a sharp decline has been recorded over the past three years. 

In this time, Pakistani exports to Afghanistan have dropped more than 40 percent in the three years that ended in June, to $889 million, according to official data. 

Bilateral trade stood at $1.01 billion last fiscal year, down more than 38 percent from $1.64 billion in fiscal 2018, reported Bloomberg.

Afghanistan meanwhile has tried to push for quicker clearance of these containers and also requested that Pakistan waive the demurrage and detention charges, which range from $120 to $200 a day, according to Nayab’s letter to the Pakistani customs office.

“Traders are losing millions of dollars because of shipping and port demurrages,” Nayab said.