Between 10,000 and 12,000 tonnes of fruit pass through the Flathouse and Albert Johnson quays in Portsmouth port each week and stevedore and fruit specialist Mainland Market Deliveries Ltd (MMD) handles roughly 65 per cent of the bananas eaten in the UK.
Long-standing customer Fyffes returned to the port in 2002 after a brief time shipping to Southampton, and Dole, Geest and JP Fresh are also committed users.
A Geest vessel is due in the port every Sunday, Fyffes schedules a vessel to arrive on Wednesday, and another Fyffes/Dole vessel is due to arrive each Thursday.
And it is those customers in particular that will be happiest that MMD now considers itself back on the right track after moving into the ownership of Portsmouth City Council (PCC) on February 29 this year.
Martin Putman, port manager and director of MMD, says: “We have invested in the region of £750,000 in facilities and I think the people who work for MMD can see security and stability long term now.”
“The aims of the previous holding company were very different to ours and therefore they were perhaps not as willing to put the investment into the site that was required. We’re looking to the future; already the site and its facilities are better than they were and the customers can see that. People will go elsewhere if they are unhappy with the service, recession or not. We will continue to make changes - there is no successful business that does not have an investment plan and we are putting the things in place that will give stability and a long-term future to MMD.
“Our customers have stuck with us. We were talking to them before we moved in there and they obviously weren’t happy with the level of service they were getting [under the previous management].
“We are negotiating with customers at the moment, and although it is difficult to make accurate predictions in the current financial climate, and for some people next year will be about battening down the hatches, we’re more than hopeful that we will have another good volume year next year. We haven’t heard from anyone yet that they expect less than this year and obviously the UK has a certain level of demand.”
Harry Eames, a former managing director of MMD, is now a consultant to the company. The company’s staff is key to everything it does, he says. “It’s a family with a lot of mouths to feed and we have all been in it together. The staff were all worried for their jobs, how to pay their mortgages and look after their families - but when a City buys the company, that gives you security. The faith of the council has been more than repaid by the team here.
“We are fortunate that our customers stuck by us,” says Eames. “They have gone through hell and high water with us and many is the time that we have sat here with empty sheds because of hurricanes. They are not customers, they are partners and we can talk comfortably with each other whatever the situation,” he says.
As importantly, the relationship between staff and management has been restored. “It’s how it used to be in the old MMD days; the governors are very approachable and you can relate to them,” says Eames.
Commercial manager David Spencer says: “We are always looking for extra volume and we have re-equipped the terminal with new racking to ensure that we are capable of handling that volume if it comes to it. It all depends on where in the week any new service arrives. We have very good, even distribution of volume at the moment when everything runs to schedule, but we do have the scope for more. The crucial thing is that we are always capable of delivering the service our customers require.”
The racking-out process was implemented to both update the facility and take into account the increasing work with containers. “The racking in itself has made life a lot easier for forklift drivers and will benefit the handling and storage of the product,” Spencer says. It has almost been completed across the sheds, but there is “quite a big agenda” to be covered before upgrading and improvement work is done. “It won’t be an overnight thing,” he adds.
“Everybody in the business has reacted positively,” says Spencer. “There is a better feeling within the business and we are seeing that in the number of pallets an hour we handle and the understanding people have of what we are trying to achieve.
“In many ways it has been a very interesting year, but I feel we have come out better for it,” he adds. “It has been a huge management change and it has worked. The support structure was always there, and it still is - we have people who know the business, know the customers and know the trade.”
With the ship steadied, Putman says: “When people are unhappy, so they become less engaged and performance gets worse. People have regained their faith that we are still here and we can do it.”
CARIBBEAN CLAIMS EUROPE IS BETRAYING PRODUCERS
The European Commission (EC) is betraying the African Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of states with its banana policy, according to Gordon Myers, secretary of the Caribbean Banana Exporters’ Association.
The nightmare is now becoming harsh reality. All the fine words about the benefit of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) for Caribbean and other ACP countries are now revealed as a snare and a delusion - at least as far as the banana trade is concerned.
The EC is proposing to cut the ACP tariff preference, on which that trade depends, to a level at which it would no longer be possible for Caribbean banana exporters to survive. Moreover, the first - and biggest - cut could come as early as January 1, 2009, just a year after the EPA came into operation.
The reason given for this is the EC’s desire to negotiate Free Trade Agreements (FTA) with various Latin American countries, starting with the Central American Group. The EC is also anxious to stave off any further litigation on bananas in the WTO and to prepare for a likely resumption of tariff negotiations in the Doha Round. But their proposal conflicts with the spirit and intention of the EPA so recently signed with the CARIFORUM counties.
The sole benefit the EPA offered to the CARIFORUM banana trade was that it would safeguard its tariff preference under WTO rules. This is no benefit at all if the preference is then reduced to a level that renders that trade unviable. Such action seems directly to contradict EC recognition, in the EPA, of the importance of that preference and the need for any “unavoidable” reduction to be phased in over as long a period as possible.
Caribbean and other ACP countries did agree during the abortive Doha Round negotiations in Geneva in July to accept a less drastic programme of tariff reductions. They did so under great pressure in the context of an across-the-board agreement by all WTO members on tariff reductions on most goods, not just bananas. Moreover, the ACP countries were cajoled into agreeing to these reductions by promises of an aid programme designed to facilitate improvements in productivity and to help those forced out of business by the tariff reductions.
Even that compensation is no longer on offer in connection with the current FTA negotiations.
The EPA is not a one way handout to developing country partners. It requires reciprocal concessions, albeit on a differential timetable, and these entail significant tariff reductions on imports from the EC into CARIFORUM countries, with consequent loss of customs revenue.
The EC treatment of ACP bananas under the EPA may give rise to very serious consideration of the balance of benefit from these arrangements. Certainly, no-one in the banana export trade imagined at the time the EPA was agreed that its benefits to them would be so drastically eroded in so short a period of time.
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