Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said seaports should not turn into warehouses, as he chaired a meeting of the Maritime Board on Tuesday, Itar-Tass reports.
"Although stevedoring is relatively orderly here, containers still are kept on the port premises for weeks: it's an outrage. No shipping company will go to a port if it knows that its container will stay here for weeks on end," Ivanov said.
This problem is not financial but organizational. "No matter how much money we invest in the development of ports - it's useless if no order is restored at the port itself," he noted.
The Maritime Board is discussing the implementation of the national sea policy in the Pacific region and the prospects for using nuclear power generating units in the construction of large capacity vessels for Russian consumers.
Meanwhile, Transport Minister Igor Levitin told the Maritime Board that the ports of Russia's Far East had practically exhausted their resource.
"The ports have approached the limit of their transshipment capacity," he said, noting that 25 seaports of the region need 74 billion roubles of investments.
A package of programs is expected to boost the cargo turnover of eastern ports by two times to 140 million tonnes.
"Fluid cargoes will account for 70 million tonnes. Last year, the far eastern pots handled 70 million tonnes of cargoes, which does not exceeded Soviet-era indicators.
"The far eastern ports are important because they provide for a link between the east and the all-Russia transport system. They account for half /14 million tonnes of the 25 million tonnes/ of Russia's coastal shipments," the minister noted.
The implementation of the Sakhalin-3 and Sakhalin-9 projects may require the construction of a new port on Sakhalin.
Russia has 62 ports, whose cargo turnover increased two-fold to 421 million tonnes in the period from 2000 throughout 2006.