Fair global trade practices and greater U.S. infrastructure investments are essential to the success of American business, a steel industry executive said today [April 13] in opening the Critical Commodities Conference in New Orleans.

After marking time for several years, an ambitious project to build a mega deep-sea container port at a greenfield site in Sydney on Cape Breton in Nova Scotia appears to be gaining traction though key pieces of the puzzle still need to fall into place. And it has a new name: Novaporte together with an adjacent logistics park called Novazone. Both are conceived to operate within a Foreign Trade Zone.

The Port of Stockton was awarded a rating upgrade by Moody’s in recognition of improved revenues and lower debt on March 28th.

Recently, leaders from business and government, including Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx and Secretary of Labor Tom Perez gathered at an event hosted by the White House National Economic Council (NEC) to discuss the promise and opportunity that ports hold not only for keeping America’s goods on the move, but for keeping America's economy on the upswing.

A broad coalition of stakeholders has escalated its attacks against the U.S. Coast Guard, qualifying as “an aberrational exercise” the latter’s recent decision to impose a sharp increase in Great Lakes pilotage rates effective April 6, shortly after the 2016 commercial navigation season on the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence waterway opens on March 21.

The book, Long Haul Legacy by F. Martin Harmon (Atlantic Book Printing), tells the tale of long haul trucking in the U.S. This is a story that has been told more than once, but Harmon fills in some important details left out of many accounts on the unique evolution of trucking in the U.S. The subtitle “SMC3 and the Evolution of Motor Freight” is frequently missing from most accounts, and frankly the omission is as big as Superman without his cape.

The admission was stunning - the US Coast Guard saying it will not enforce the new international container weight rule has raised serious doubts as to whether the rule, scheduled to go into effect on July 1, can now be enforced.

David Williams, president and CEO of Safmarine a Maersk company told AJOT he is cautiously optimistic that the company's trade related to Africa and West Central Asia, will recover from the current slowdown and increase to 4% per annum by 2020.

Najim Shaikh, vice-president commercial import for MSC, sees Canada as a steady, reliable growth market for containerized cargo in the years ahead at key ports benefiting from substantial infrastructure and capacity investments as well as waterfront stability through labour agreements extending to 2018 in the cases of Montreal, Vancouver and Prince Rupert and until 2022 in Saint John.

Georgia’s governor and top ports executive each see the Peach State surpassing the Port of New York & New Jersey as having the No. 1 containerized cargo gateway on the U.S. East Coast, perhaps in as few as a dozen years.