Crystal ball for the shipping industry

MAJOR international freight transport insurer TT Club is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Those 50 years have seen a transformation in the liner shipping industry, to the extent that what we have now bears no resemblance to the days when conventional general cargo ships still carried virtually everything from ping pong balls to railway locomotives around the globe. Then, the container was still a novelty and few grasped what sort of revolution was about to take place.

In the 1970s the liner shipping conferences still dominated the scene, to the extent that in 1974 the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) passed its Code of Conduct for Liner Conferences.

At the time, the Danish government explained the Code's purpose as affording "the shipping lines of developing countries extended opportunities to participate in the conference system and is drafted so as to regulate conferences and their activities in open trades". It now difficult to imagine a world where sea transport was priced according to strictly enforced tariffs based on cargo value and where the trades were divided among shipping lines who were each allocated the numbers of vessels th…