RECENTLY, A CAMPAIGN has begun to resurrect the effort to establish an ocean-carrier container port in Quonset. While maximizing Quonset’s profitability is certainly a worthy aim, containerized-cargo professionals find incomprehensible the idea that such a project would be contemplated in Rhode Island.

While port development sounds good, it relies upon a complex industry that is, itself, undergoing acute contraction. Very simply, ocean transportation is anything but a growth business, and many authoritative industry resources bear out this fact. As developed economies buy fewer goods from lesser-developed ones, empty ships and container yards abound. According to AXS-Alphaliner, a Paris-based global consultancy, idle container ships around the world now represent 800,000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units); the Port of Singapore has become a veritable “parking lot” for ships that are no longer needed.

The largest global ocean trades, Asia/Europe and Asia/U.S. circuits, are severely depressed, and carriers have reduced services drastically, cutting and eliminating routes and withdrawing ships. Recently, the CEO of conglomerate Neptune Orient Line (NOL) told The Journal of Commerce he will soon see much of the world’s container ship fleet from his Singapore office window. Such gallows humor is common in an industry that has hit terribly hard times.

Drewry Shipping Consultants monitors freight rates from Hong Kong to northern Europe and cites some, exclusive of surcharges, falling to as low as $100 per TEU. Shipping lines are resorting to creative money-saving strategies; at least two have started steaming around the Cape of Good Hope to avoid tolls at the Suez Canal. Such developments are illustrative of steep overall declines in inbound cargo — the largest in more than 20 years. Drewry predicts in its latest quarterly, Container Forecaster, that 2009 will be the toughest test yet for the container industry. Four container operators failed in 2008, and, it says, “Further casualties are a real possibility . . . . The gap in supply and demand is still too big.”

The world’s largest ocean carrier, Denmark’s Maersk Line, has announced numerous vessel lay-ups and withdrawal from the Port of Charleston. Like other shipping companies, Maersk is eliminating, not adding, ports of call. In January, Lloyd’s List reported that containerized imports through busy Los Angeles and Long Beach plummeted in the final weeks of 2008 as the economic meltdown accelerated. Reuters reports that Hong Kong’s global carrier, OOCL, has slashed 25 percent of its carrier capacity. Taiwan’s Evergreen and Yang Ming have both announced major restructuring of U.S. offices. After a fourth quarter net loss of $149 million, NOL will close its U.S. headquarters, in Oakland, Calif., eliminating jobs and moving what’s left to Arizona. These dark developments spell nothing but danger for a Rhode Island experiment.

Industry chatter is a good indicator of tomorrow’s headlines, and the news is not good. Two large European carriers will soon announce lay-ups totaling about 60 ships. All lines have had cargo losses, and some have seen their credit ratings downgraded.

Indeed, the global economic downturn threatens to change the face of the shipping industry. Some big names will disappear, while others will merge. At least one carrier has been reported to have received an emergency cash infusion from its national government. Throughout the world, orders for new ships are being canceled.

Jobs promised by advocates of a Quonset container port do not jibe with the layoffs and furloughs facing workers in ports like Seattle, where container volume has fallen 13.6 percent amid declines in both import and export cargoes. Indirect jobs, those created by the purchases of goods and services by firms doing business with the port, also have fallen off precipitously.

A glimmer of opportunity may lie with the “marine highways” under discussion along the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf of Mexico, which involve moving containers on barges, thus reducing highway traffic. Unfortunately, the relatively low volumes that barges carry and considerable state, federal and local subsidies required until such operations become economically viable present significant problems.

While the discouraging economic realities of ocean transportation are reasons enough to re-think the Quonset proposal, numerous additional obstacles unrelated to the current recession — and too numerous to describe here — cause further concern. They involve organized-labor contractual obligations and port-withdrawal liability payments, access to major goods markets, rail and roadway infrastructure and weight limits, environmental regulations and automated cargo systems inconsistent with job creation and International Longshoremen’s Association rules.

Neighboring ports of New York/New Jersey have been underused for many years, a trend that continues unabated. The battle for market share is fierce and costly, and those who allege otherwise are misleading a vulnerable public. Anything but a “magic bullet,” a deepwater port at Quonset will be doomed to failure, another sad case of “Build it and they will not come.”

Thomas M. Lloyd Jr., whose career in the international containerized-freight industry spans more than 30 years, lives in Westerly.