The International Transport Forum says its “views are grounded in data, evidence and economic research with the objective to foster efficient transport solutions that serve citizens.”
The International Transport Forum (ITF) of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has responded to criticism levied against one of its recent reports by the World Shipping Council. (WSC).
WSC on Monday attacked ITF’s paper, titled “Container Shipping in Europe Data for the Evaluation of the EU Consortia Block Exemption,” saying it was “riddled with fundamental flaws” and that it should be “disregarded in its entirety” by European regulators who are considering whether to extend an antitrust protection called the block exemption regulation (BER ) for container shipping consortia past April 2020.
The debate is an important one because space-sharing agreements between shipping companies has become almost universal, not only in the main east-west trades dominated by the 2M, Ocean and THE alliances, but on services around the world. The BER allows container carriers to share space on the same ships on trades in and out of Europe.
The World Shipping Council says such space-sharing arrangements create many benefits for shippers: more frequent service, a wider range of service and the ability for carriers to operate larger, more efficient ships, which helps drive down transportation costs. In the U.S. container trades, space-sharing agreements are reviewed by the Federal Maritime Commission. The dozens of agreements between carriers, most of which are space-sharing arrangements, can be viewed on the FMC’s online library.
An ITF spokesman said Tuesday his organization “will write to the WSC in response to the criticism voiced,” but said “addressing container shipping regulation in a report is fully consistent with ITF’s mandate,” which calls for the organization to “foster a deeper understanding, among policymakers and wider audiences, of the role of transport as a key to economic growth and of its impact on the environmental and social dimensions of sustainability.”
He added that “the ITF is not an interested party in the debate about container shipping alliances. Its views are grounded in data, evidence and economic research with the objective to foster efficient transport solutions that serve citizens.”
He said the ITF report was “the product of collaboration of ITF with the European Commission. It was in exchanges with the commission that data potentially relevant for the evaluation of the consortia BER by the commission was identified.”
World Shipping Council criticized the ITF’s use of statistics, saying it combined data from two different sources and it is not clear how they have been combined.
ITF said it “draws on input from many sources to help inform its findings. This is a core feature of ITF work, regardless whether a report was written by several authors or by a single one.
“Broad input was solicited and received for the report,” ITF said. A stakeholder meeting on container shipping was held Feb. 8 at which some of the data in the report was presented. “The WSC participated in the meeting, along with other representatives of the shipping industry, the European Commission and several ITF member countries.”
ITF said it was “open to discussing any methodological questions that the report has raised in a constructive manner.”
