高級英語 Advanced English(張漢熙) 第一冊 13.Britannia Rues the Waves

Britannia Rues the Waves

Andrew Neil

Britain's merchant navy seldom grabs the headlines these days; it is almost a forgotten industry. Yet shipping is the essential lifeline for the nation's economy. Ninety-nine percent of our trade in and out of the country goes by ship—and over half of it in British ships.

Shipping is also a significant British success story. It earns over ￡1000 million a year in foreign exchange earnings: without our merchant fleet, the balance of payments would be permanently in deficit, despite North Sea oil. But ,today this vital British industry is more in peril than ever before. On almost all the major sea routes of the world, the British fleet risks being elbowed out by stiff foreign competition.

The threat comes from two main directions: from the Russians and the Eastern bloc countries who are now in the middle of a massive expansion of their merchant navies, and carving their way into the international shipping trade by severely undercutting Western shipping compaines; and from the merchant fleets of the developing nations, who are bent on taking over the lion's share of the trade between Europe and Africa, Asia and the Far East-- routes in which Britain has a bib stake.

Today, the British fleet no longer dominates the high seas: our share of the world's merchant fleet has fallen from 40 per cent to around eight per cent. But, in terms of tonnage, the British merchant navy has continued to expand, it can now carry over two-thirds more than it could in 1914, and, almost alone among our traditional industries, shipping has remained a major success story.

Unlike the rest of British industry, ship-owners invested big. In the early 1960s, the shipping companies cashed in on government grants and tax concessions. Between 1966 and 1976, British shipping lines invested at a rate of over ￡1 million a day. By the early 1970s, it seemed that, some-where in the world, a new British ship was being launched every week. The result is that Britain has a very modern fleet: the average age of our merchant ships is only six years, and over half the fleet is under five years old. For some time now, British shipping managers have stayed ahead of the competition by investing in the most sophisticated ships.

The other major factor which has played a key role in the dominance of the British merchant navy is an institution invented by the British well over 100 years ago: the ‘conference'.

In the middle of the 19th century, competition between sailing-ships and steam-ships became out-throat, and price cutting ruined many long-established companies. So the ship owners got together to establish a more settled system, and they set up a system of price fixing. In other words, every possible type of cargo had a price, which all owners agreed to charge. It was, in fact, a cartel, though the British ship owners gave it the more dignified name of a’ conference'. The system has certainly stood the test of time. Today, there are about 300 conferences governing the trade-routes of the world, and the British still play a major role.

By reducing competition, shipping conferences have taken some of the risk out of the dodgy business of moving goods by sea. They make it harder, perhaps, to make a big killing in good times, because you have to share the trade with other conference members. But they make it easier to weather the bad times, because there is no mad, competitive scramble for the available trade.

By the early 1970s, bad times were just around the corner. The world shipbuilding boom reached its peak in 1973,but that was the year of the Arab-lsraeli war, which was followed rapidly by the quadrupling of oil prices. By 1974, the industrialised world had begun its slide into the worst depression since the 1980s, and the shipping industry had entered its long years of crisis.

The first to be affected were the oil-tanker fleets. As oil demand was cut back, charter rates plummeted, and the estuaries of the world became jammed with the steadily increasing numbers of moth-ball tankers. Norway and Greece suffered most. British ship owners had not become so involved in the tanker boom in the first place, so they were not so badly affected. By 1976, the slump had begun to bite into the bulk-carrier trade. Bulk carriers are ships that carry dry cargo of one particular kind, such as sugar, coal or wheat, with iron ore being by far the most important. But with the world steel industry deep in the doldrums, who needed iron ore carriers? With its big bulk-carrier fleet, the British shipping industry now began to feel the pinch.

Even though the slump spread fast into most shipping sectors, the British fleet was still a long way from bankruptcy. The one area which has weathered the economic storms best is that controlled by the conferences: the scheduled freight-liner services -- and that is where Britain's fleet is strongly entrenched.

Liner-freight vessels offer people who want to send goods by sea a regular, scheduled shipping service; they follow agreed routes, or ‘lines', and call at ports on a greed dates. For example, if I want to send a shipment of spare tractor parts from Taiwan to Bangkok, all I have to do is contact the Far East Freight Conference, and that will be able to tell me when the next liner ship will be calling at Taiwan, the exact date on which it will get to Bangkok, and the going freight rate. It is an ideal ‘parcel' service for people with cargoes that are not big enough to make it worth chartering a whole ship.

It is also a plus for the ship owners not to be dependent on only one customer. Liner ships carry all sorts of different cargoes -- mainly finished manufactured goods -- so, if there is a slump in one particular industry, provided there is still buoyancy in other industries, the liner fleets can still survive. That gives them a distinct advantage over oil tankers or bulk carriers, because the latter are dependent on one or two basic raw materials. That is why Britain has remained relatively strong.

Much of Britain's liner fleet rarely sees a British port. Our ships are extensive cross-traders; that is, they carry goods between foreign countries. British companies are big, for example, on the Japan-to-Australia run, and on the growing trade routes between the Far East and the Middle East, around the Persian Gulf. Until recently, those routes were highly profitable for the British companies, and a major source of foreign currency for Britain. They are also the routes on which the Third World and the Russians are out to make the biggest inroads.

Most emerging countries in the Third World are out to carry a bigger share of their trade in their own ships. Developing countries regard a merchant navy as something of a status symbol -- the next thing to go for after a national airline. Singapore has expanded their fleet by 6 000 percent in the last 15 years, India by 400 percent.

The challenge from the Third World has always been foreseen by our shipping companies. P & O, for example, while still out to increase the total freight it carries, is planning for a gradual reduction in its percentage share of the trade with the new shipping powers of the Third World. But P & O has no intention of throwing in the towel. The key tactic behind its strategy of holding on to the richest slice of the trade has been to move up-market -- to go where the Third World cannot follow: into high-technology investment.

Containers, for example, were an American invention, but it was British ship owners who put up the money to pioneer the international deep-sea container service. Containers save time, because the loading is done in the factory or warehouse, rather than on the dockside, and they are very secure against theft; except for a code number on the outside, there is no indication of what is inside the box. To cash in on the container revolution, you need a sophisticated system of roads and railways, something that most Third World countries do not have: And container ships are expensive, around ￡50 million each.

P & O's high-technology, high-investment strategy,however, is far from being the whole answer to the Third World threat. The developing countries are not out to compete with Western fleets by commercial means; they want to impose a set of rules which will guarantee them a major slice of the shipping trade. This demand has found official expression in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, UNCTAD. The UNCTAD liner code lays down that between two trading partners, 80 per cent of the freight should be split equally between their respective merchant fleets. That leaves only 20 per cent to go into the numerous cross-traders, all fighting for a share, and it is on these cross-trades that British liner companies earn 40 per cent of their revenue. Not enough countries have ratified the UNCTAD code yet to bring it into force. But if it does become universal, it could strike a severe blow to Britain's liner trade.

The Iron Curtain countries represent an even greater and more organised threat to the future of Britain's liner ships, and it is a threat that is much more difficult to counter.

Russia has expanded its cargo-liner fleet far faster than the growth in either its own trade or world trade would justify. Today, it has the largest liner fleet in the world and another one million tons should come into service before 1980. And with its policy of excessively low freight rates, the Russian merchant navy has already made major inroads into Western trade.

Russia now carries 95 per cent of its seaborne trade with the EEC in its own ships. More important, it is biting deeply into the major cross-trading routes of the world. Eastern bloc countries -- Russia, with Poland and East Germany- have already captured 20 per cent of the cargo traffic on the busy sea-lanes of the North Atlantic, almost 25 per cent of the trade between Europe and South America and just abou, t the same percentage of the trade between Europe and East Africa.,

How can the Russians afford to undercut by up to 40 percent? Well, Soviet ships are not necessarily out to make a profit, in our sense of the word. The name of the same ,for Russian ships, is hard currency. The Soviet Union is becoming more dependent on Western imports -- from grain to technology -- but the West will not accept roubles in payment. So Russia needs hard currencies, tike the dollar, the mark or the yen, even sterling, to pay for its imports. It is these currencies Russian ships earn as cross-traders. It does not matter very much if they are operating at a loss; that can be made up by the Soviet government in roubles.

But there is more to it than that for the Russians. The Soviet mercantile marine obviously acts as a support to the Soviet navy, very much as Western fleets used to do. But there are important differences. The Soviet merchant fleet, which has now been almost 20 years in growing, has developed the kinds of ships which would certainly expand the Soviet reach well beyond its perimeters. For example, much of the heavy equipment for the Cubans and Angolans was brought in Soviet merchant ships. So this mercantile marine capability is certainly a great advance in the Soviet ability to project their power at some distance from their own frontiers.

And this is also part of a general Soviet hydrographic policy to map the oceans of the world, to get to know the ports and, above all, to deepen contacts with the states with whom the Russians are developing close trading ties.

How can Western ship owners react to undercutting of 40 per cent that would drive them out of business if they did the same?

There is a limit, of course, to what any British government can do on its own. Shipping is an essentially international business, and Britain can only counter the challenges of the developing world and the Russians at an international level. But whom could we count on for support? The EEC is so divided about shipping that it is almost powerless to act .Take the challenge of the developing world. The French do not mind the UNCTAD code on liner shipping because it would help them to increase their share of the liner trade; the same is true for the Germans and the Belgians. So Britain cannot rely on concerted EEC action on that issue. As far as the Russians are concerned, Britain, along with West Germany and Denmark, has been calling for a coordinated response; the monitoring of Russian ship movements and restrictions on the number of Russian ships allowed to call at EEC ports. But, last June, the French, because of their Russian ties, blocked plans along these lines. It will be November before the question is considered again.

British ship owners are so far happy with the strength of the British government attempts to force the EEC into action. They believe that the Trade Department, which looks after shipping, understands their problems. But they are far less sure about other government ministers, especially those in the powerful Industry Department, which oversees shipbuilding. Ship owners fear that saving jobs in Britain's ailing shipyards comes well before saving its merchant fleet.

British shipyard, s are currently churning out 24 vessels for Poland. The Poles were lured to Britain by the gift of a￡28 million subsidy and the promise that British shipbuilders would raise all the credit; so while our shipping fleet is under attack from communist ships, our government is using British taxpayers' money to out their shipbuilding costs. We are doing the same for developing countries' fleets. India is now a major Third World shipping power, yet Britain is to build six ships for the Indians -- for nothing.

In the end, British companies could be driven out of shipping altogether. Some, such as P & O, have already moved into other fields, from house building to oil. Smaller shipping lines do not have the resources to diversify. They face extinction. And when they go, so does a huge slice of the few traditional industries worth keeping.

(from The Listener, August, 1978)