Infrastructure and Trade Shares Shaping the U.S. West Coast

USWC Historic Shares of U.S. Containerized Trade

Now that the U.S. Commerce Department has resumed publishing monthly foreign trade statistics, albeit with a temporary time-lag. We will resume sharing the following two exhibits displaying the extent to which U.S. West Coast ports’ share of America’s containerized foreign trade has changed over the past decade.

While these exhibits support the conclusion that USWC ports have been ceding shares of the nation’s containerized marine trade to ports on the East and Gulf Coasts, they are reveal the extent to which container traffic along the West Coast continues to be consolidated at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in Southern California.

Infrastructure Ratings

This year’s annual Infrastructure Report Card from the American Society of Civil Engineers gave a relatively high grade of “B” (Good: Adequate for Now) to the condition of the nation’s ports. Founded in 1852, the ASCE is the country’s oldest national civil engineering organization, representing the views of more than 160,000 civil engineers in private practice, government, industry, and academia. By comparison, “D” grades were assigned to America’s stormwater and transit infrastructures. The condition of America’s inland waterways was judged more harshly than its seaports, receiving a grade of “C-Minus“.

The ASCE report card persists with an irritating bias toward infrastructure issues affecting Eastern and Midwestern states. For example, although the ASCE report’s treatment of the nation’s inland waterways acknowledges that the U.S. has “two major navigable river systems: the Mississippi and Columbia–Snake Rivers,” the ensuing assessment entirely ignores the latter system, which encompasses Oregon’s Port of Portland as well as the Washington State Ports of Longview, Kalama, and Vancouver. It’s a curious, if revealing omission.

The ASCE report is emphatic in stating that river ports are especially critical in handling shipments of U.S. soybeans to global markets. As its authors observe: “Stiff trade competition with Brazil is one example of why the U.S. needs the inland waterway system to be modernized. The top two producers in the world soybean market, the U.S. and Brazil, compete for the same overseas markets. For both countries, the competitiveness of their soybean exports depends on low transportation costs to critical markets, primarily China and Europe.”

The report further notes that Brazil’s decades-long investments in its ports, along with more recent Chinese investments in bolstering Brazil’s role as an alternate source of soybeans, have made soybean exporters in the South American nation much more cost competitive with shippers in the U.S. Since 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Brazil has been the top exporter of soybeans.

Regrettably, by dwelling exclusively on the Mississippi River’s role in conveying U.S. soybeans to overseas markets, the ASCE report overlooks the fact that the three Washington State ports along the Columbia River have accounted for as much as one-fifth of all U.S. soybean export tonnage in recent years.