The Shoreline between Nature and Society, a Changing Heritage - Vulnerability of Coastal Ecosystems and Adaptation - page 196

5.3.6. The globalization of trade and its effects on coastlines
Today, more than a billion tonnes of goods get shipped around the
oceans and loaded onto the various ports and harbors. This realization
arises from a double dynamic: the first that pushes toward an
increasingly extreme integration of the whole world on the economic
level; and the second that was initiated at the end of World War II and
saw the capacity to load ships increase dramatically at the same time
as old freighters were giving way to increasingly more specialized
boats (from ore and oil tankers, all the way to the very modern
container ships). Globalization is both a consequence of a general loss
of toll rights, and of the deregulation of financial market in the context
of the global expansion of capitalism; it also marks the accelerated
integration of the economies at the regional level (Mercosur, EU); the
appearance of new competitors and new markets in Third World
countries, emerging markets that influence the global economy
(China, Brazil, Russia, India as well as Indonesia and even Nigeria).
Finally, it is a response to the globalization of production systems for
the large (globalized) multinational companies in that these are more
flexible organizationally and spatially. So at the beginning of the 21st
Century, our economy traveled by sea, carried around by all these
technical and technological revolutions with the shipping container as
their flagship. Our economy travels by sea as this is the most
economical means of mass transport and that for which the costs have
gone down most dramatically. American engineer Malcolm McLean
and his team in the 1950s probably had only a vague idea of the extent
to which the little transport-all box they were devising would impact
the world. A technological revolution is underway as the various
actors of the maritime transport, i.e. ship-owners of regular routes,
forwarders and handlers, reorganize their working practices around
this technical innovation. The ships that used to transport these
containers at the end of the 1960s could not fit more than one
thousand boxes, whereas large containers today can fit up to 18,000
units. Needless to stress the demands in terms of the size of docks,
platforms and intermodal transportation infrastructure to fit 18,000
trucks on land. The stake for the ports becomes considerable. The
territorial animation is at the scale of hinterlands: these ports define
the grids, and their influence is significant as they combine