Chain Links.

Port services take time to build, but are easily extinguished. The price can be costly.

ANA MARIE FONTURA WAS HAVING a devil of a time. She had been scouring the streets of Santos for hours, looking for beef. Not just any beef, mind you, but specially blessed beef, for some Middle Eastern sailors. No other meat would do and those sailors needed to eat.

The week before it had been pigeons. Or was it doves? She never really quite understood what the captain wanted for his Asian crew Doves, pigeons--the thought of eating either turned her stomach. But her job is not to question the eating habits of the babel of sailors serving Santos, but to cater to them.

"They want all kinds of food," she says. "And it is very difficult to find what they want."

Such is the lot of a ship's chandler. These folks supply the ships with food and other items for sailors and no big port can do without them. It is much the same with those that provide bunker fuel, water and a whole assortment of services for ships when they dock in a port. A ship at anchor is far from being a ship at rest.

The companies that provide these services are the glue that holds ocean transportation together, the links that keep the logistics chain rolling. The shipping services are just part of the mix. Trucking companies, restaurants, clubs--they grow and prosper as does the port. Over the years, the network takes hold, grows and spawns more business.

However, the relationships are easily uprooted.

Santos found that out in the late 1990s, when strikes, consolidations and trade trends diverted or dried up cargo. Shops closed. Service companies folded. The streets around the port resemble some forsaken ghost town.

Businesses that remain open tread water. Rosaly Rodrigues, a manager of the ABC House restaurant and club, looks wistfully through the empty club out the doors to the bare streets. "It has been awful ever since the Americans left," she says.

Easy come, easy go. U.S. sailors, for the most part, stopped calling Brazilian ports about two years ago when then Crowley American Transport pulled its U.S.-flagged ships from the service before selling that part of its business to Hamburg-Sud. Americans spend more money in ports because they make more money than most other foreign crews. What is more the new owners have changed routes, sending ships to other ports.

Some of the cargo that previously went to Santos, for example, went to other ports, such as Paranagua, Vitoria or, as Mercosur trade grew, southern ports such as Sao Francisco do Sul. While the total volume of boxed cargo for Brazilian, imports and exports, grew by about a third to about 2.6 million 20-foot containers between 1997 and 2000, the trade for Santos grew by only 14%. Trade through Sao Francisco do Sul, on the other hand, grew by 76%.

While trade grows quickly, the services--those logistics links--cannot be easily created. Just ask the captain of the then P&O shipping line container ship that was waiting for another pilot to be free at Sao Francisco do Sul. Local piloting is one of those services that shipping lines take for granted until the need arises to get a ship into a local port and there is no one available. Most places require a local pilot to take over a ship during those times. Sea captains often just don't know enough about the local undersea geography to do the job. Local pilots train for the task.

Anyway, a pilot was not available. And the P&O ship, during the wait, apparently lost power and anchor. It smacked into a cliff and sat there for months. The locals pilfered all the goods they could.

Shippers and shipping lines need to take all of this into account as they make port choices. Weighing anchor for another port may do more than just turn a waterfront into a ghost town. It may also turn a ship into a new piece of coastal landscape.