PACIFIC RIM TRADE : World : Regional Seaports Flourish : From Singapore to Seattle, more trade means bustling waterfronts. And steel containers mean ever-faster cargo movement.

A Burlington Northern train from Chicago rumbles to a stop on Seattle’s waterfront and unloads grain headed for Asia. Nearby, Nissans roll onto the dock from a notch in a massive steel box of a ship. A Chinese vessel weighed down by thousands of steel boxes filled with everything from toys to electronics moves toward a row of orange steel cranes perched along the waterfront like birds at a pond.

The burgeoning economies of Asia have made major trade centers of Western cities like Seattle and Los Angeles. The bulk of America’s massive imports of manufactured products and much of its exports of raw food, chemicals and machinery pass through these Pacific ports, generating thousands of jobs for longshoremen, trade lawyers, distributors and freight forwarders.

But if the West Coast ports are being lifted by Asia’s dynamism, the great ports of Asia--Hong Kong, Singapore, Yokohama/Tokyo and Taiwan’s Kaohsiung--are being propelled forward at a dizzying speed.

Singapore and Hong Kong, the world’s busiest ports, handled 80% more container volume last year than they did in 1990. Together, the two processed 18% of world container traffic in 1993, reinforcing their role as emerging centers of finance and commerce. They, along with two other major beneficiaries of Pacific Rim trade--South Korea and Taiwan--are following Japan’s steps to becoming leading investors in factories and office buildings around the world.

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As the colonized have turned colonizers, world trade has been stood on its head. When the Panama Canal opened in 1914, Asian ports were still the dreamy destinations of adventurous Yankee traders. They made and lost fortunes sailing schooners thousands of miles around Cape Horn to pick up such products as tea, silk and spices. But the real trade was across the Atlantic. The opening of the canal was celebrated in San Francisco because it would give Pacific traders more direct access to moneyed merchants of the Eastern Seaboard.

“To the Pacific Coast, it (the canal) means a new lease of life,” said Hiram Chittenden, the Port of Seattle president in 1912, in a speech that underscored the importance of Atlantic markets to Pacific ports. “The deep poverty of the hordes who swarm the Asiatic shores, and the backward condition of industry there, are not promotive of vigorous commercial intercourse,” Chittenden argued, “for they offer relatively little to sell and less with which to buy.”

That was then. Now the newest container ships are too big to squeeze through the Panama Canal. But they don’t need to. The world’s most dynamic economies are in the Asia Pacific region. America’s fastest-growing urban areas are in the West. Cargo that needs to reach the East Coast can get there quickest by coming into a West Coast port and being put on a freight train or a tractor-trailer.

Today, it is the ailing Eastern ports that want a lifeline to the Pacific. They hope that as Southeast Asia emerges as the new manufacturing center, more shipping traffic will trickle to the East Coast by way of the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean Sea, bringing some business back to their underutilized harbors.

“The big (trade) volumes used to be in the Atlantic. Now they are in the Pacific,” says Thomas Dowd, professor of port and marine transport management at the University of Washington.

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The shift has been accompanied by vastly expanded use of 20-foot and 40-foot steel containers. These containers have revolutionized trade by speeding the movement of cargo even as it has taken away much of the local flavor of Eastern ports.

“There was a certain charm to a general cargo pier,” recalls Larry Gellerman, a captain with American President Lines who retired after 50 years at sea. “People hollering. The smell of tar and rubber and spices. It was a symphony of odors. Now every box looks the same. There isn’t any of the fun.”

Fun and adventure, of course, are not the point. Asia’s big ports use the latest in heavy equipment and computerized scheduling systems to move containers with the speed and regularity of an assembly line. With the exception of Japan, which closes its ports on Sundays, all the major Asian ports operate seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

Singapore and Hong Kong are by far the world’s largest ports. They are the Venices of the Pacific Era. The art, perhaps, is yet to come. But these port cities, sitting astride major trade routes and amid expanding regional economies, act as Asia’s entrepot ports. They gather cargo from the passing traffic, warehouse it, consolidate it into larger carriers and send it off in new directions.

A shipment of Bakersfield cotton headed for Jakarta, Indonesia, for example, might leave Long Beach and travel 10 days on a high-speed “line haul” carrier to Hong Kong or Kaohsiung, another emerging entrepot port. The cargo might sit in port until being picked up by another large ship headed for Singapore. From Singapore it could be put in a smaller vessel for delivery to Jakarta.

Hong Kong, fed by rapidly rising Chinese trade, has recently surpassed Singapore to become the prince of ports. In January, it handled 857,372 equivalent units of containers (that many 20-foot containers or half that many 40-foot containers), a startling 42% more container traffic than in the year before, more traffic than India or Brazil handle in a year.

Manufacturing plants springing up across China’s Pearl River delta are one of the biggest sources of exports, sending cargo on riverboats to Hong Kong for transfer to larger ships. Much of the incoming cargo is transferred from ships directly onto small feeder boats that travel upriver. The port handles 40% of all China’s exports.

Singapore has fallen behind Hong Kong, but it is far from standing still. Singapore was host to 92,655 vessels last year and handled 20% more container volume than the year before. The port of Singapore is so crowded, says Robert Koplowitz, a marketing director at the Port of Seattle who recently visited Singapore, that “you can almost walk across the harbor.” By comparison, Seattle got one-hundredth the traffic with just 900 ship calls last year.

Singapore is investing billions of dollars in new facilities that will quadruple its capacity by 1997, giving it nine times the current combined capacities of the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. Some analysts suggest that Singapore hopes to benefit from any confusion resulting from Hong Kong’s reversion to China in 1997. Other ports--including Kaohsiung, Shanghai and Yantian, near Hong Kong--are also challenging Hong Kong’s supremacy.

But Singapore also faces growing competition from regional ports. Malaysia’s Port Kelang is spending $593 million to double its capacity. Indonesia, which now sends 70% of its exports through Singapore, plans to work with Evergreen, a Taiwanese shipping company, to build a $1-billion port on Batam Island, just 12 miles southwest of Singapore. The port would tap into the heavy traffic through the Strait of Malacca now dependent on Singapore.

If competition is tough in Asia, it is equally tough along the West Coast, where shipping lines can choose among three major ports.

Seattle recently won a major victory when American President Lines decided to double the size of its terminal in Seattle. The shipping line, which is based in Oakland, now divides its traffic between Seattle and Long Beach.

On the losing side has been Oakland, whose harbor, blocked with river silt, can’t receive big container ships except at high tide. Oakland may yet turn around. After a two-decade struggle, the port has recently received permission to begin some of the dredging necessary to allow round-the-clock passage of bigger ships. The coming transfer of 400 acres of nearby oceanfront property now used by the U.S. Navy could also give Oakland a new lease on life by nearly doubling its size and adding two miles of new shoreline.

Los Angeles and Long Beach, however, are the real powerhouses in West Coast trade, taking business away from both Oakland and Seattle.

The industrywide move toward ever-larger container ships has helped the southern ports. Since the average container ship now carries 4,400 20-foot equivalents of steel containers, up from 2,500 just a few years ago, ports like Long Beach, with plenty of space for storage and ready access to a metropolitan Los Angeles market of 14 million people, have a big advantage.

“If you only want to stop at one port, you will choose Los Angeles (or Long Beach) because of the big local market,” concedes one Port of Seattle official.

Long Beach’s Achilles’ heel is traffic congestion that slows the transfer of cargo from ships to major rail terminals. The port is seeking financing for a $1-billion-plus plan to create a direct rail and truck corridor to ease the congestion.

All the Asian ports have a major advantage over Western ports as they respond to growth: the absence of public interference.

“When they want more terminals, they just carve another mountain and dump it in the sea,” says one Seattle port official. The ports of Tokyo and Yokohama are made up of huge man-made islands that pair modern container terminals with condos and shopping centers.

In contrast, Western ports must struggle with environmental impact reports and public hearings to reclaim land or dredge. They must also respond to public complaints about noise from trains and cranes at night.

The ports of South Korea and Japan are more like American ports in their operations than the entrepot ports of Singapore and Hong Kong. But they are the mirror opposite in types of cargo: They export manufactured products and import raw materials.

A weakening dollar is helping to change the pattern somewhat. America is selling more auto parts, machinery and chemicals. High-tech refrigeration is making it possible to export high-value asparagus, celery and strawberries by ship.

There is a natural corrective mechanism that encourages the process. Since America imports much more than it exports, shipping lines offer discounts of 20% or more for exported freight because they need to get the containers back to Asia to refill them with more products.

Still, many containers are leaving U.S. ports filled with commodities that are hardly signs of emerging American competitiveness. One popular item? Bales of hay for animal feed.