BOW WAVE 395

Bow Wave Issue 395--Antipodes Edition

news and views on trade, insurance and risk

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(c)2007 WavyLine.com	Issue No 395 18 Jun 07
Published free of charge to Readers
Editor: Sam Ignarski
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In this issue:

1. Welcome
2. Quarterpoints
3. Clecat's Position on Customs Representation in the EU
4. Security and Over-Reacting
5. Sydney's Future Intermodal Needs
6. And Finally...

1. Welcome

Poem of the Week

The Invention of Fractions

God himself made the whole numbers: everything else is the work of man.
--Leopold Kronnecker

God created the whole numbers:
the first born, the seventh seal,
Ten Commandments etched in stone,
the Twelve Tribes of Israel --
Ten we've already lost --
forty days and forty nights,
Saul's ten thousand and David's ten thousand.
'Be of one heart and one mind' --
the whole numbers, the counting numbers.

It took humankind to need less than this;
to invent fractions, percentages, decimals.
Only humankind could need the concepts
of splintering and dividing,
of things lost or broken,
of settling for the part instead of the whole.

Only humankind could find the whole numbers,
infinite as they are, to be wanting;
though given a limitless supply,
we still had no way
to measure what we keep
in our many-chambered hearts.

Jessica Goodfellow, from A Pilgrim's Guide to Chaos in the Heartland.

New Readers this week include:-

Luis F. Gómez de Mariaca, GM of Dolphitrans in Spain David Osborne of the Steamship Mutual

News of Readers

Tom Birch Reynardson has opened up his own law firm in London

http://www.birchreynardson.com

Yvonne Ho, formerly of Tradewinds,has been appointed Commercial Manager of Inchcape Shipping Services in Singapore

Lloyd's have announced the appointment of Jose Ribeiro as the new Director of International Markets and Business Development

Readers Write

Jim McCabe writes:-

For those Bow Wave Readers who have never experienced a "Live" WebCast on the Internet - here is an opportunity to check it out. Senator John McCain will be giving the commencement speech at the USMMA Graduation Ceremonies on Monday June 18, 2007 - Check it out as WebCasting is fast replacing "Cable TV" as the Medium of Choice for such High Profile Events. It will be interesting to hear what this Presidential Candidate has to say about the vital role being played by those of us in the Marine Industry.

Here is the press story from Yahoo

http://nd.marketwire.com/news/showcache.do?itemid=9874409

Here is the site to view the live webcast on Monday:-

http://tvworldwide.com/events/tell_america/070618/

Here is the Maritime TV site with info on the Tell America campaign

http://www.MaritimeTV.com

From Chris Allport:-

Enjoying reading through this week's edition (Bow Wave Issue 394) I was reminded by the article on "ICE - In case of Emergency" of the ICE system introduced by CEFIC (European Chemical Industries Association) back around 1991-2 so took a quick look on their website. Hey presto, it not only still exists but is in place across the whole of the EU for all transportation of hazardous goods. For those of your readers who are interested and especially Mike Wall, take a look at:-

http://www.cefic.be/Templates/shwStory.asp?NID=492&HID=378.

Note from the Editor

It is a convention when writing for the papers that you do not advocate your own cause too insistently. This is why the column in item 2 fails to mention ITS--International Transport Solutions--which is a cause dear to the editor's heart. But the conventions of e-zines are elastic enough to allow us to commend this insurer to Readers as a source of freight liability and e&o insurance expertise.

Enjoy!

2. Quarterpoints

Your editor's recent column in Lloyd's List asks where have the freight people gone....

Freighting Classes

I was talking the other day to the dean of freight brokers at a leading broking house. A fifty something fellow who has forgotten more than most people know of his specialism, he declared he was unable to find people to follow in his footsteps. Since I too am in the foothills of this grumbly decade of age, I wondered what if anything might be causing this shortage of candidates. The Germans call this contingent of people Nachwuchs, something like second growth or succession.

It is true that the freight side of insurance is not the most glamourous precinct in the industry’s acres. Called "goods in transit" by an earlier generation, the field takes in the insurance of freight forwarders, NVOCs, hauliers, warehousekeepers, logisticians consolidators and packers. It has its higher ground--there are specialty fields like art, bloodstock, specie and high value items, but quite of lot of it has an oily rag quality, the clients scrapping to make a margin and sometimes taking undue risks in so doing.

But certainly so far as my induction into the field is concerned, I learned most of what I know about it from an older contingent of brokers, ex-freight- forwarders-turned- insurers and claims men who were the day to day confidants of the clients and assureds. As a field it has some things not necessarily designed to be attractive to the high rollers of insurance. To understand the world of freight liability you need a decent understanding of the laws relating to land sea and air transport, an eye for the small print in documents of carriage, an understanding of the pressures of the industry and a determination to end up on the winning side of what is always a fight to make underwriting surpluses. A few languages are handy as well as some time spent in a forwarding heavy environment like Germany, Switzerland or even the United States.

A career spent in a field bounded by law, languages, trade and worldwide trading can’t be bad for all that. What can possibly be causing the greying of this industry? Perhaps part of the reason may be found in our strange new post modern economies, where manufacturing is dwindling and the vanning and shipping of goods is becoming an interest of minorities. People all over the developed world in our industry are to be found declaiming in these pages that their cultures are turning their backs on the sea. It may perhaps follow that the inland part of the industry is liable to suffer from the same want of interest in it. And even though the average price of the goods in our shops includes anything from 5 to 10 per cent to account for shipping and handling, you rarely see or hear anything broadcast about the freight industry, except lamenting about its propensity to pollute the environment.

It may also be that end of middle everything has removed something vital in the attractiveness of freight to the uncommitted. We are sometimes called anoraks by wags, for our interest in the subject. This interest is often reciprocated in the offices of clients and there are always buyers of liability insurance in the MAT markets who punch above their weight so far as their knowledge of the subject goes. But the freight industries, like most other industries, has seen a transformation of the distribution of companies. They are either enormous concerns like K+N, Panalpina or Deutsche Post, or they are small specialised firms who make a living with a few dozen staff. The solid middling part of the industry has gone along with the high street butcher. This is true also of the brokers. Where once there were highly proficient firms like Jensen & Dickens, who specialised in the field and made a good living, today the large brokers seem to rule the roost, with only a smattering of firms who specialise in the needs of say the
owner-haulier.

There are of course firms and mutuals who are known for their standing interest in the subject of freight. One, the Galatea agency has recently been acquired by a large insurer evidently keen to acquire
expertise without the usual waiting period of bringing on untrained people. My old friends in the TT Club have in their ranks some very good specialists. But the small and medium clients in this industry, whose numbers, especially in the Asia Pacific are legion, are not exactly smothered in expert attention as I write.

Perhaps there is a place in the training agendas of the CII for a marine and transport course which attacks the subject in depth. The widening of the market as more insurance companies offer a freight insurance option to their marine clients will no doubt in time force on newer talent. It is hard to imagine a time when the globalised world will not need people who understand the moments when the smooth and cheap flow of operations are interrupted by human error, acts of god and the general tendency for things in life to go wrong. Absent a decent supply of anoraks, the papers documenting these mistakes otherwise tend to end up in the bottom drawers of their authors, where undealt with, they turn from moderately bad to worse.

http://www.lloydslist.com

3. Clecat's Position on Customs Representation in the EU

Marco Sorgetti has sent in the (rather silky) a paper on the public position paper Clecat submitted to the President of the EU Commission, Mr Barroso.

http://www.clecat.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=211&Itemid=4

4. Security and Over-Reacting

Your editor is one of life's inveterate travellers whose world has been seen during many years through the prism of all manner of dock and warehouse visits. But travel today (especially alas from GB and the USA) is a complete pain in the backside, made worse by the new imperatives of the security people. Who out there writes tirelessly about the wrong-mindedness of so many security initiatives?

Security expert Bruce Schneier is your man. He has been writing again about the reaction to rare, dramatic events in the current edition of his zine Cyrpto-gram:-

"If you want to do something that makes security sense, figure out what's common among a bunch of rare events, and concentrate your countermeasures there. Focus on the general risk of terrorism, and not the specific threat of airplane bombings using liquid explosives. Focus on the general risk of troubled young adults, and not the specific threat of a lone gunman wandering around a college campus. Ignore the movie-plot threats, and concentrate on the real risks."

Read his words of sanity at:-

http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0706.html

5. Sydney's Future Intermodal Needs

Alison Cook of SFC NSW has sent in this note:-

The Sea Freight Council of NSW's (SFC NSW) latest report, for industry comment, on "Sydney's Intermodal System" was officially released by Hon. Joe Tripodi yesterday morning, who described the report as "timely and needed for government and industry" and "a valuable resource for practitioners".

Participants from across all sectors of the transport and logistics industry as well as representatives of key industry bodies attended the release event to hear the report's findings and to provide their valued input.
The report is the result of qualitative research by consultants Strategic Design & Development through close consultation with key industry players and builds upon the Council's previous reports. Its purpose is to outline the need for a major intermodal terminal(s) in southern and western Sydney and offer recommendations for an open access intermodal terminal ownership and management plan.
Mr Tony Davidson, Chair of the report’s steering committee, presented throughput statistics that shows projected road/rail capacity short fall if the 30 year 8% p.a. average international container growth rate continues though Port Botany.

Mr Geoff Farnsworth, SFC NSW Chair, stressed "there is an urgency to act. The container freight throughput growth is such that to do nothing is not an option."

An 'open-access' model for the terminal is considered the most likely way to maximise the take up of volume growth and to improve transport efficiency in the container task serving Sydney.

Open-access is clearly the requirement for terminals, to give equal service to both big and small carriers, importers and exporters. The report highlights the opportunity of achieving this result.

Mr Farnsworth stressed that there is still more to do. The findings of the report now need further analysis - the challenge is to put this information to use. Industry is asked to give feedback on the recommendations and issues raised by 31 July 2007.

The report is available online at:-

http://www.seafreightnsw.com.au

6. And Finally...

Many thanks to Frazer Hunt for this rude Australian joke:

Helen Clark called Michael Cullen into her office one day and said,
'Michael, I have a great idea! We are going to go all-out to win back the confidence of the grassroots electorate'.

'Good idea PM, how will we go about it?' asked Cullen.
'Well,' said Helen 'we'll get ourselves one of those long Driza-Bone coats, some proper gumboots, a stick and a leather hat - oh, and a collie; then we'll really look the part. We'll go to a nice old pub, in Taihape, or one of those country towns, and show how we really enjoy getting back to the heartland. We'll mix and mingle with the locals, and get to understand their problems and aspirations - to let them know the Labour Party has not forgotten them.'
'Right PM' said Cullen.

So a few days later, all kitted out and with the requisite collie in tow, they set off from Wellington. Eventually they arrived at just the place they were looking for, found a nice quiet pub and, with the dog at heel, went in and up to the bar.

'Good evening barman, may we have two pints of Lion Red,' said Helen.
'Good evening, Prime Minister' said the landlord,' two pints of the best it is, coming up'.

Clark and Cullen stood leaning on the bar drinking their beer and chatting, nodding now and again to the locals who came into the bar for a drink. The dog lay quietly at their feet.

All of a sudden, the door from the adjacent bar swung open, and in came a weather-beaten old farmer. He walked up to the collie, lifted its tail and looked underneath, shrugged his shoulders, and walked back to the other bar.

A few moments later, in came another old farmer. He too walked up to the dog, lifted its tail, looked underneath, scratched his head and went back to the other bar.

Over the course of the next hour or so, several other locals came in, lifted the dog's tail, and went away looking puzzled.
Eventually Clark and Cullen could stand it no longer, and called the barman over.

'Tell me' said Clark, 'why did all those old farmers come in and look under the dog's tail like that? Is it an old custom around here?'
'Good Lord no,' said the barman. 'It's just that someone went and told them that there was a collie in this bar with two a*seholes.'

P.S. Thanks to Paul Dixon's Joke of the Day Zine for this one:-

Harry had a bit of a drinking problem.

Every night, after dinner, he took off for the local watering hole. He spent the whole evening there, and arrived home, well inebriated, around midnight each night.

He always had trouble getting his key into the keyhole, and getting the door opened. His wife, waiting up for him, would go to the door and let him in. Then she would proceed to yell and scream at him, for his constant nights out, and coming home in a drunken state. But, Harry continued his nightly routine.

One day, the wife was talking to a friend about her husband's behavior, and was particularly distraught by it all.

The friend listened to her, and then said, "Why don't you treat him a little differently when he comes home? Instead of berating him, why don't you give him some loving words, and welcome him home with a kiss? He then might change his ways." The wife thought it was worth trying.

That night, Harry took off again, after dinner. And, about midnight, he arrived home, in his usual condition. His wife heard him at the door, quickly went to it, opened the door, and let Harry in.

This time, instead of berating him, as she had always done, she took his arm, and led him into the living room. She sat him down in an easy chair, put his feet up on the ottoman and took his shoes off. Then she went behind him, and started to cuddle him a little. After a while, she said to him, "It's pretty late. I think we had better go upstairs to bed now, don't you?"

At that, Harry replied, in his inebriated state, "I guess we might as well. I'll get in trouble when I get home anyway."

JokeoftheDay-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

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