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GEORGIA PORTS AUTHORITY INVESTS IN THE FUTURE

georgia ports authority

GEORGIA PORTS AUTHORITY INVESTS IN THE FUTURE

Capacity expansion, cranes and infrastructure are the focuses for Georgia Ports Authority (GPA) in FY2021. The GPA announced the official approval of $305 million in projects to increase overall TEU capacity for the Port of Savannah from 6 million to 7.4 million. 

The goal of meeting increased cargo volume includes support from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers through the deepening of the Savannah Harbor. Additional projects include the re-purposing of property on Garden City Terminal and doubling GPA’s rail lift capacity to 2 million TEUs per year through commissioning the second set of nine new working tracks at the Mason Mega Rail terminal. 

The GPA has begun refurbishing Berth 1 at the Garden City Terminal to increase the dock capacity to include four 16,000-TEU vessels–the largest class of container ships currently serving the U.S. East Coast–as well as three additional ships. The greater efficiency possible when working one large vessel compared to multiple smaller ones will increase Savannah’s overall berth capacity and velocity of vessel service. This renovation alone will add 1 million TEUs per year of capacity for the berth. 

The most recent additions completed by the GPA include the Appalachian Regional Port’s addition of six container storage bays, bringing the TEU slots to 390 for increased demand at the inland terminal and an overall capacity increase of 25,000 TEUs annually. 

In February, the GPA commissioned an additional 6,000 TEUs of grounded container slots at Savannah’s Ocean Terminal, including space for dry and refrigerated containers. The expanded container yard is served by six rubber-tired gantry cranes, for an increased capacity there of 210,000 TEUs annually.

At Garden City Terminal, the GPA added six new ship-to-shore cranes in FY2020 and 20 new rubber-tired gantry cranes for a total of 172. Also at Garden City Terminal, the GPA brought online new container stacks for berths 7, 8 and 9, increasing Savannah’s annual capacity by 400,000 TEUs.

Looking ahead to the future, the GPA has purchased 145 acres adjacent to the Mason Mega Rail Terminal. GPA is developing 92 of those acres for an additional 750,000 annual TEU capacity within the next two years. 

Georgia ports

GEORGIA PORTS AUTHORITY GETS EVEN BIGGER SHIP READY

The completion of Garden City Terminal dock construction allows the Port of Savannah to serve three 14,000-TEU vessels as well as up to eight vessels simultaneously. But now the Georgia Ports Authority has announced the acquisition of 145 contiguous acres to the port that will allow for more than 1 million twenty-foot equivalent container units in annual capacity.

“As the Georgia Ports Authority enters its 75th year, we are proud to follow in the tradition of those who came before us, making exciting advances in capacity and technology to ensure our terminals remain at the forefront of global commerce,” said GPA Executive Director Griff Lynch at the Georgia Foreign Trade Conference on Feb. 4. “This is the largest addition of container terminal space in Savannah in more than 20 years, and represents a powerful opportunity for Georgia to take on new trade.”

Construction currently underway at the Ocean Terminal container yard is expected to be completed by the end of this year. An additional berth to be finished by 2023 will mean Garden City Terminal will have four big ship slots. A new Savannah Container Terminal on Hutchinson Island is projected to come online in 2025. The GPA’s goal is to increase its capacity to more than 9 million TEUs by 2030.

Georgia’s deepwater ports and inland barge terminals support more than 439,000 jobs throughout the state annually and contribute $25 billion in income, $106 billion in revenue and $2.9 billion in state and local taxes to Georgia’s economy, according to the GPA.

WTO

Erasing the Global Gains from the WTO Government Procurement Agreement?

Government purchases are a trillion-dollar opportunity for U.S. businesses

Governments buy a wide variety of goods and services from the private sector, from bridges and road construction to power plants and digital infrastructure to office and hospital supplies. In 2018, global government procurement amounted to $11 trillion or 12 percent of global GDP. The U.S. government procurement market alone was $837 billion in 2010.

While most countries have regulations to ensure government procurement is handled in a fair and transparent manner, procurement processes are susceptible to a high incidence of corruption, particularly in the form of undue influence on the bidding outcomes of public contracts.

Enter global procurement trade disciplines

The first agreement on government procurement – called the “Tokyo Round Code on Government Procurement” – was negotiated in 1979 by a small group of countries who wanted to develop a set of harmonized rules governing public procurement that would set a high standard for transparency and openness. That agreement was subsequently renegotiated as the Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) in 1994 as part of the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and members agreed to further expand the GPA in 2012. As of May of last year, when Australia became the most recent member to join the GPA, 48 countries were party to the Agreement, with 34 countries having observer status (including 10 of those in active negotiations to join the agreement). The GPA now covers $1.7 trillion in government procurement activities from its member countries.

The GPA includes general disciplines to ensure fair, open and transparent procurement processes for products that exceed a dollar threshold specified by the agreement. Additionally, each country has committed to a “schedule” which specifies which of its entities and purchases are subject to the agreement. Countries typically exclude defense and national security purchases from the agreement as well as set-asides for small, minority-owned and veteran-owned businesses. Disputes under the GPA can be raised through the WTO dispute settlement system.
value of global procurement

Some WTO members but not all

The GPA is a so-called “plurilateral” agreement, meaning only a subgroup of WTO member countries are party to it, and therefore the WTO’s most-favored-nation principle does not apply. Rather, the countries that are parties to the agreement grant each other access to their government procurement markets under the terms of the GPA, but that access is not offered to WTO member countries that are not GPA members.

The United States includes similar procurement language from the GPA in its bilateral free trade agreements, like the recently negotiated U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. All told, the United States has procurement agreements with 58 countries, including the GPA countries and countries with which it has separate free trade agreements.

Even for countries that are not GPA members, the rules in the agreement have become the accepted norms for government procurement globally, with most countries aspiring to this level of fairness and transparency, even if they don’t implement the GPA fully.

The relationship between GPA and “Buy American” requirements

Prior to the GPA, Congress enacted a series of domestic content statutes to ensure that public procurement projects funded by U.S. tax dollars benefit U.S. firms and workers. The Buy American Act of 1933 requires federal government procurement of U.S.-origin articles, supplies and material or manufactured products to be produced “substantially all” from domestic inputs. While equipment can have a minimal amount of foreign content to qualify, the allowed amount is extremely low. The act generally also allows a price preference for domestic end products and construction materials.

Buy American requirements may be waived under three circumstances: (1) if a decision is made that it is in the public interest to do so; (2) if the cost of U.S.-made products is unreasonable; or (3) if the products are not available in sufficient quality or quantity from U.S. producers. Since the GPA was negotiated, a fourth circumstance was introduced: Buy American can be waived with respect to procurement bids originating from countries that have provided reciprocal access to their own domestic procurement markets.

A push for expansion?

The Trump administration is reportedly reviewing the benefits of the WTO’s Government Procurement Agreement. As reported to the WTO, the United States offered more procurement opportunities to foreign firms in 2010 (the last year for which data are available) than the next five largest GPA parties combined, which include the European Union’s 27 members, Japan, South Korea, Norway and Canada. The United States may open as much as 80 percent of federal contracts to foreign suppliers, whereas the European Union, Japan and Korea may open somewhere between 13 and 30 percent of central government contracts to foreign suppliers.

However, a U.S. government review that offered those calculations also points out that lags and inconsistencies in foreign government data reporting, data gaps, and a lack of methodology for reporting on sub-federal procurement, make it difficult to determine GPA benefits with accuracy.

And while foreign suppliers are able to compete for certain U.S. government contracts, the GPA and bilateral free trade agreements enable U.S. companies to compete in the nearly $2 trillion dollar government procurement market in the other signatory countries, an opportunity that would be significantly limited by withdrawal from the GPA. In many cases, such as sales of medical devices and medicines to state-run hospitals, software for government agency use, sales of power equipment, and the construction of hard infrastructure, the GPA offers the primary form of access by U.S. companies to foreign markets.

Worse than losing reciprocity

Ironically, American withdrawal from GPA would also complicate the ability of U.S. companies to sell their products to the U.S. government. Very few U.S. products today are 100 percent American. Supply chains of U.S. companies are increasingly global, meaning that even products manufactured within the United States are likely to have non-U.S. components or materials. Today, U.S. companies selling equipment to the U.S. government containing non-U.S. content from a GPA signatory country are not subject to the Buy American Act. However, if the United States were to withdraw from GPA, Buy American regulations would apply, potentially disqualifying U.S. companies from selling products that contain foreign content to the U.S. government.

Participation in the GPA not only maintains U.S. companies’ ability to compete for foreign contracts, it also gives the U.S. government leverage to negotiate greater market access under better terms by seeking to expand coverage. This may be particularly important as economies grow around the world and begin to spend higher percentages of their budgets on government procurement. Also, the race is on to set technology standards around the world such as 5G. If U.S. companies cannot bid to secure government contracts, they may find themselves on the outside of key growth markets, ceding them to competitors from Europe, Canada, Japan and China.

Another way to improve the WTO

While the global trade rules in the GPA seem like an arcane subject, the agreement has had a profound impact on government procurement practices globally. It opened an enormous government procurement market for the signatory countries – including the United States – and created a set of open and transparent regulations that even non-signatories countries work toward. Working within the agreement to improve and expand coverage would benefit U.S. suppliers not just to compete overseas, but to compete for contracts here at home.

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Orit headshot

Orit Frenkel is the Executive Director of the American Leadership Initiative, which is advancing a new smart power paradigm of American global leadership. She is also the President of Frenkel Strategies, a consulting firm specializing in trade and Asia. Previously she spent 26 years as an executive for GE and before that as a trade negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

This article originally appeared on TradeVistas.org. Republished with permission.