• PAGE ONE
• INDEX
• HOME

Kochi port gearing up for cashewnuts, cotton imports

Our Bureau

Kochi, May 18

IN the light of nomination of Kochi Port for imports of cotton and raw cashewnuts by the Director General of Foreign Trade, the port has taken special arrangements to stack the cotton boxes to facilitate fumigation, customs documentation etc so as to min imise the stay of cotton boxes in the port.

The Traffic Manager, Mr H.C.Venkatesh, said that in order to streamline the easy and quicker flow of cotton boxes, the Plant Quarantine Department and the Customs Department were being consulted for the purpose.

He said that the port was regularly handling imported Egyptian and American cotton in large quantities for 100 per cent export oriented units in Kerala and Tamil Nadu and the port had been encouraging import of cotton and export of cotton garments and ya rn by relaxing cut off time to the maximum extent by introducing Volume Discount Schemes.

He also ruled out stoppage of work at the port in the past seven to eight years due to labour trouble and said that Kochi was one of the port in the south which handles large quantities of very high value cargoes such as spices, garments, cashew kernels, coffee, tea and marine products.

The DGFT had rightly nominated the port for import of these commodities in view of its better performance in the financial year 2000-01 as it handled 1,59,000 tonnes of raw cashewnuts as against 1,29,000 tonnes in the previous year, he said.

He said that direct sailing from East African ports and also dedicated container vessel services during the cashew season had increased the imports of cashew in containers last year in which the port handled more than 4,000 teus of cashew imports in addi tion to many parcels of break bulk. One of the important factors which encouraged the cashew imports through Kochi was the fact that the port was rated as 100 per cent pilferage free port, he added.

The port could muster 9.31 per cent increase over its targets by handling 13.12 million tonnes of cargo during 2000-01 and by handling 1,43,115 teus and the achieved growth in container traffic was more than 10 per cent. Quicker turn-round of vessels, fa ster evacuation of boxes coupled with frequent sailing had made it possible, he said.