‘Privatizing the Port of Santos was a bad idea,” says Brazil’s Minister of Ports

The Minister of Ports and Airports, Márcio França, claimed that the idea of privatizing the Port of Santos, a project that did not come to fruition during the Bolsonaro government, was bad, but it does not mean that the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is against privatizations altogether.

“The Port of Santos is almost entirely privatized; its operations are all private, yet the port remains under public authority. This is the model adopted in 99% of the world. Selling the registry of the port authority would create, in my view, serious problems. For example, a public port authority is responsible for safeguarding the port. Once the port is no longer public, who would do that?” said the minister at the event Arko Conference Brasil 2023.

França said he discussed the matter with the former Minister of Infrastructure, now current governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas. “I told him that a privatization like this was one of the worst mistakes made by the past government from the point of view of logistics: imagining that it was possible to sell the port authority,” he said. França also assessed that the port’s interiorization strategy of the previous administration was wrong and that went against international standards. “All the main ports in the world are going offshore to get a deeper draft without dredging,” he said.

The minister stated that the current government is not against privatization as long as certain criteria are met. “We already have 250 authorized private port terminals in Brazil. Anyone who wants to build terminals can do so. We encourage them to do so. Now we are going to keep public assets to keep an eye on cases we think are strategic”, he argued. “We don’t have a problem with privatization, but there has to be an agency that regulates and supervises it,” he added.

See below a chart with data on exports and imports of containers from the Port of Santos between January 2019 and January 2023. The data is from DataLiner.

Export and import of containers – Porto de Santos | Jan 2019 – Jan 2023 | TEUs

Source: DataLiner (click here to request a demo)

França also criticized the Port of Santos’ current structural situation, drawing an analogy to the sale of used cars to describe the port’s management policy during the Bolsonaro administration.

“They gathered resources with dredging and did nothing that had to be done. All of this, I assume, bearing in mind that the problem was soon to be passed on to private parties,” said the minister. “It’s like having a used car and leaving it in bad condition to sell it. Evidently, the car would cost a little cheaper because its appearance would be bad”, he added.

Source: A Tribuna

To read the original text, please visit: https://www.atribuna.com.br/noticias/portomar/ideia-de-privatizar-porto-de-santos-era-equivocada-diz-ministro-marcio-franca

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