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New Zealand lobbies for leeway in new international shipping rules

Xinhua, June 2, 2016 Adjust font size:

New Zealand exporters are expected to benefit from more flexible rules regarding the verification of shipping container weights, the country's shipping authority said Thursday.

Maritime New Zealand chiefs said they had successfully lobbied the International Maritime Organization (IMO) for flexibility in introducing the new regulations to be introduced on July 1.

Acting director Lindsay Sturt said New Zealand port companies and exporters had raised concerns about how new international regulations would be introduced and Maritime New Zealand took up those concerns.

"It is important to understand that about 97 percent of our country's trade is by ship," Sturt said in a statement.

"Disruption during the transition to the new regulations could cause unnecessary and potentially costly delays."

Under the IMO's new regulations, the shipper exporting a container had to provide its "verified gross mass" by methods set out in the regulations or the container would not be loaded.

Currently, container weights were declared, but serious incidents in the past had shown inaccurate declarations and grossly understated container weights.

Dangerous incidents overseas included container stacks collapsing, and ships being overstressed and becoming unstable.

New Zealand's concerns centered on how to manage containers loaded before July 1 that would reach their final port on or after that date, and possible teething problems with necessary software updates, data sharing, and communication systems.

The IMO had agreed to a practical and pragmatic approach for the three months after July 1.

It would permit packed containers loaded on a ship before July 1 to be shipped to their final port without the verified gross mass, and flexibility to refine, if necessary, procedures for documenting, communicating and sharing verified gross mass information, without stopping shipments.

"The new weight verification rules are an important safety measure to help protect seafarers, cargoes and ships. We are glad they will be a requirement for international shipping," Sturt said. Endit