Harbours are fascinating places to witness
the increasing interconnections the world is experiencing. A casual walk along
the southern coast of Singapore, overlooking the harbour, provides just the
experience.
For miles, ships are parked in the sea of
Singapore. At night, their lights shine lightly along the horizon, while during
the day their long shapes paint the horizon with narrow rectangles of maroons
and reds. Awaiting their turn to offload and onload at the harbour, the writing
along their sides hints at their port of origin. Hamburg Süd, Odfjell, 中国远洋 – Germany, Norway and China all
meet in Singapore harbour.
Singapore is the world's second busiest
port in terms of total shipping tonnage after Shanghai. Every day, millions of
tons of furniture, cars, clothes, food are offloaded and unloaded along the
city state's decks, managed by over 150,000 people employed across 7,000
companies. Every year, 7% of Singapore's total GDP is created in the huge
warehouses and decks at the south and east of the city.
Ships from Europe, the Americas and Oceania
gather here. In the port, thousands of containers are lifted in the air,
containing the essential or superfluous elements for people all around the
world. A Dutch ship might be travelling from Hong-Kong to Brazil with a
stopover in Singapore, transporting thousands of remote-controlled cars
assembled in Guangdong in China to excited children in Bolivia. These cars
might have been constructed thanks to the trip undertaken by a ship registered
in Australia, who earlier in the year sailed from Japan to China, filling a
good part of its containers with electronic equipment designed by Japanese
engineers. And too, a British-owned ship might have transported a new expatriate's
luxury car from the United States to Singapore.
It is around harbours that one feels that
the world is becoming increasingly small, and that distances are being slowly
eliminated. More than cargo airports, which are often inaccessible to the
general public, harbours are the physical face of globalisation.
