Container company CMA-CGM will visit Vlissingen, The Netherlands, as its last port in a weekly service to West Africa as of 1 October. The Ships MV AS Fatima and MV Elan will mainly transport onions and fish. After Maersk and MSC, CMA-CGM is the third container shipping company in the world. This is the first time a large container service has been contracted for the Zeeuwse port. "You don't get ships like that every day, and certainly not on a weekly basis," says Jack Kloosterboer, satisfied.
"Normally the onions were loaded in Antwerp, like with other shipping lines, but this ship comes from Antwerp to Vlissingen as a last 'Port of Call'. The Zeeuwse onion package for West Africa is around 700,000 tonnes annually, so it's significant. This offers huge advantages for the onion exporters. They have to hand in their 24 hours before the boat leaves in Antwerp. In Vlissingen it's a few hours at most, they could even be delivered by tractor! The flexibility is better here and the costs are lower for the exporters."
"At the moment it's one boat with around 100 containers, but it could be a route to more traffic of empty or full containers to Vlissingen, which can then be used by the Zeeuwse onion and fish exporters. This combination is what makes it so interesting," says Jack Kloosterboer, who started a container depot before, because he saw opportunities for Vlissingen to develop itself as a reefer port for so called shortsea-transport. There were previous attempts to get the container ships to Vlissingen, but the construction of large container terminals such as the Westerschelde Container Terminal and Verbrugge Container Terminal never took off.