06/16/2002: 

Rotterdam Harbor: the largest in the world

Since I arrived here in Rotterdam one month ago, I have been curious to know its harbor, which is the largest in the world. Thus, some days ago I decided to take a riverboat tour. It seemed to be the only way to get there because the enterprise is really quite huge. The boat was very nice and it crowded with foreigners, mainly from Germany and Japan. The day was sunny and I could get a little tanned.

The tour lasted one and a half hour, but the time was not enough to know everything. The harbor is really enormous. One of the things that drew my attention was that we don’t see workers moving around: everything is mechanized. The containers are carried by automated trucks. The ships are big and come from everywhere in the world. I managed to see Aurora, a ship from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Due to the colors of the containers the harbor looks fantastic, very different from the gray and dark containers of our “City of Containers”, exhibited next to Guaíba shore during the last Mercosur Biennial.

 Rotterdam harbor is the largest in the world and also the most important in Europe. It was inaugurated during the 14^th century (more specifically in 1328), as a small fishing harbor at Rotte riverside. It was from the XIX century on, when a connection to the North Sea named Nieuwe Waterweg was opened that it started to terrifically grow, since it established a communication way with the powerful and progressive German industry. 

Every year, around 300 million tons are conveyed there. The harbor and industrial area has around 10,500 hectares. An average of 30, 000 ships/year (82.2/day) leave the harbor and 130,000 (356/day) have it as a destination. Rotterdam is one of the 500 ship routes that connect one thousand different harbors. It is also the main spot for oil, chemicals, containers, steel, carbon, food and metal transportation in Europe.

Its load-displacement allows carrying up to 350 thousand tons. The largest containers weigh around seven thousand tons and sometimes more. Due to this intensive trade of goods from and to many parts of the world, many representatives from the most important shipping companies are located there. There is a big sector for the importation of citric fruits in Europe and several sections of Asian products distribution. But the largest area is reserved for the industry, mainly chemical and petrochemical. Some multinationals have important industrial complexes there, producing goods for Europe and, in some cases, for the whole world. Oil products and chemicals represent almost the half of the goods transported via this harbor.  Five refineries and several chemical industries are located around it; the German steel industry also uses it to flow off its immense production. These companies use and operate their own terminals. The harbor is also very used for the trade of agricultural products, as grains, animal foodstuff, fertilizers and food as meat, fish, grains, fruit, vegetables and juices.    

After knowing the harbor I could better assess the importance of Rotterdam for the Dutch and European economies. It is impossible to imagine the amount of goods and money that circulates there every day. I got also impressed by the technology that supports all, the huge ships, containers, harbor automation. I’ve heard that the relation between Rotterdam and Amsterdam may be compared to the one existing between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. Actually, Rotterdam seems to be the place where the wealth is produced; Amsterdam, where it is spent.

After this tour, I’ve been considering... when we buy an orange juice in the supermarket we can’t figure how many places it has gone through, and the whole process it was required to bring it to the final consumer as well as the amount of money and people involved in this process. Thinking about this, I’ve remembered the gaúcho movie picture “Ilha das Flores”. The story follows the path of a tomato that ends in a garbage deposit and becomes food for the pigs and the poor people of the region.

The tangle of ships, containers and hoists at the harbor, moving around hundreds of goods, made me figure out how complex our economy is; we are not able to realize it in our everyday shopping at supermarkets, which need to be supplied with thousands of products that come from the industries, which, on their turn search for their raw-material in near sites and also in the farthest places of the planet, involving thousands of transportation routes and ships in an organization that we have never imagined.

Images of the Harbor: 

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