Is shipping too cheap?

No doubt about it, modern shipping represents a tremendous bargain. The realities are awesome, with goods being transported half way around the world for a fraction of their value. All those manufactured goods with "Made in China" stamped on them, the Chilean wine and Tasmanian apples - it is cheap sea transport that makes it possible for us to enjoy them all. Similarly, with the petrol and diesel we pump from the filling stations into our tanks - a tiny proportion of the cost of the fuel is accounted by the price of ocean shipping that moved the crude oil to the refineries or the product to the ports.

For 150 years, as shipping has become more efficient, and infinitely more productive, it has become cheaper and cheaper to use. The cost of shipping cargo in the last century of commercial sail, aboard the crack clippers, was more than sixty times that of moving cargo the same distance from the Far East today. It is scale economies, high volumes, efficient ships, good ports and a lot of advanced technology that has made shipping so cheap that the cost of transport by sea barely features in the price of a unit delivered from a factory in one part of the world to its consumer in another.

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http://www.eshippingtoday.com/ST/ST/2008/11/17/index.shtml