Goods transporters’ strike continues

Cargo supply across the border has been suspended since last Friday.

KARACHI: Transporters that carry supplies for Nato forces and Afghan Transit Trade cargo have decided to continue their strike against the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR).

Drivers, cleaners and truck owners staged a demonstration on Mauripur Road, near Crown Cinema on Monday and shouted slogans against the country’s tax collecting body and Pakistan Customs. The transporters have been up in arms against the FBR’s bonded carrier system, which has made it mandatory for truck owners to get themselves registered with one of nearly 40 companies that have been awarded freight-forwarding contracts by the Customs department.

Customs officials award these companies the goods that needed to be transported to Afghanistan, and these companies in turn allot them to the transporters that are registered with them. A truck owner who registers himself with one of these companies cannot register with another one. The system was put in place by the FBR last year. Truck owners have been complaining that they remain stuck for days whenever their company runs out of goods to supply to Afghanistan.

Since the transporters went on strike on Friday, supplies to Nato forces in Afghanistan have been suspended. Trade activities under the Afghan Transit Trade agreement have also come to a standstill. Over 8,500 trucks belonging to the alliance have not shipped a single consignment to Afghanistan during the last four days, claimed Hanif Khan Marwat, general secretary of the All Pakistan Goods Transporters Ittehad. APGTI is an alliance of various transporters’ unions that are principally involved in supplying goods to Afghanistan.



An APGTI delegation met Sindh Transport Minister Akhtar Hussian Jadoon on Monday and presented him their demands. Marwat told The Express Tribune that the minister contacted the FBR chairperson and Customs authorities, and later assured them he would also approach the prime minister.  Apart from the abolishment of FBR’s bonded carrier system, APGTI has demanded compensation for trucks that were torched by miscreants on their way to Afghanistan.

The transport alliance has also demanded the elimination of the “de-sealing system” for Afghanistan-bound container trucks. Explaining the system, Marwat said that licensed companies issue a “seal” to every truck that carries goods to Afghanistan. This “seal” is a set of Customs documents that makes that truck responsible for the container that it is carrying to Afghanistan.

The transporters claim that these documents bar them from transporting other goods even when they have delivered the container to its destination across the border. Marwat claimed that in order to get a truck “de-sealed”, transporters have to come back to Pakistan and then bribe these freight-forwarding companies.

However, Marwat and the chairperson of the All Pakistan Combined Truck and Trailers Welfare Association, Mustaqil Afridi, warned that truckers that transport cargo goods within the country will also soon join their strike.

If that were to happen, it would be a replay of a countrywide strike by goods transporters last December, that continued for 11 days. “We organised a wheel-jam strike across the country from December 1 to 12. We ended it when the government assured us that our demands will be addressed, but nothing has been done so far,” complained Afridi.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 8^th, 2013.