The Business Programme of the 16th International Exhibition and Conference for Commercial Shipping, Shipbuilding, Offshore Energy, Ports, Inland Waterways and Oceanography Neva-2021 opened with the session “Global Container System”.
The participants discussed several topics: safety of container shipments, legal grounds for using new technological devices to protect and preserve cargo, legal aspects that proprietary containers encounter, and fraud protection, insuring cargo shipments, and more.
The switch to container shipments was the main technological breakthrough in the 20th century in transportation. The experience of using containers, equipment combining the functions of transportation packaging and an enlarged cargo unit has been around for over a hundred years. However, the process of mass containerisation of transport and economics that is sometimes called the “global container revolution” occurred in the second half of the last century.
The representative from the RD-Group, Sergey Matveev, told the session participants about the problems of preserving perishable cargo. He provided information that Russia currently uses 16-30-year-old equipment that due to its age is not adapted for transporting perishable cargo. It is therefore more important to use state-of-the-art electronic devices to control the condition of the cargo during shipping. This means temperature sensors that transmit data about the condition of the cargo and an SOS signal if something happens.
The lawyer Andrey discussed several stories about the complexity and length of litigation and recommended seeking justice in the Maritime Arbitration Commission (MAC) in the Chamber of Industry and Trade. “The Commission members have much more time to get to the heart of the case and prepare a writ of execution”, he asserts. “In the arbitration courts, the judges review 50-70 cases a day, they simply do not have the time to understand what they are about”. True, involving the MAC (Arbitration Court) is voluntary and both the plaintiff and the defendant should appeal there at the same time. The consultant from the insurance company Narvskiye Vorota, Elena Semenova, told the participants about ship insurance.