Roll on Columbia

Jock O’Connell

I suppose, since it’s December, that I could have written a commentary with a Christmas theme. You know, something about the guy hawking fir trees on the sidewalk opposite the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong or which Carrefour in Istanbul carries cans of Ocean Spray cranberry sauce. But no. This month I’m going to write about the underappreciated economic significance of a river in the Pacific Northwest.

It’s not an entirely inappropriate seasonal topic since I’m finishing up this commentary in Paris, where I spent a few minutes this morning on the Quai d’Orsay following the upstream progress of a cargo-carrying pẻniche as it navigated its way past one tourist-laden bateau after another.

In truth, the inspiration for this piece initially came to me a couple of weeks ago while I was standing on the heights of Bratislava Castle watching a tug guide a loaded barge downstream on the river below. At that moment, it suddenly occurred to me that I had not commented in quite some time about the Ports of Kalama, Longview, and Vancouver on the Washington State bank of the Columbia River. The last time, I think, was when I wrote a piece titled “Calamity at Kalama?” about the increased tariffs China had imposed on U.S. soybeans in response to tariffs President Trump had raised on Chinese manufactured goods.

The storied river that flows past Bratislava is what the Slovaks call the Dunaj. About 100 miles downstream at Budapest, the Hungarians refer to the same waterway as the Duna, while upstream in Austria and even further upriver at its source in Germany, it’s the Donau. To everyone else, it’s the Danube, western Europe’s longest river and blue only when the sun is shining brightly. Before it empties into the Black Sea, it passes through and abets commerce in Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Ukraine. By contrast, the Seine is arguably more important emotionally than commercially to the French. While much less famous around the world than the Danube or the Seine, the Columbia River also plays a large but largely unacknowledged role in world trade.

Much of the media coverage of the nation’s maritime trade tends to be obsessive about containers. TV reporters can’t talk about foreign trade without posing near the nearest gargantuan crane hovering over an equally gargantuan container ship. Similarly, no print article about America’s ports goes to press without a helpful reminder to readers what a TEU is. One unfortunate result of this preoccupation with goods transported in metal boxes is that we tend to overlook and therefore minimize the river ports that convey so much of America’s farm produce in bulk to overseas customers.

Even when rivers are seen to play an unambiguously significant role in transporting goods to market, it’s often the ports at the mouth of those rivers that grab all the glory. Consider the mightiest of North America’s rivers. Riverboats and barges moving down the Mississippi (failure of which to spell correctly was once cause for keeping students back a grade) have long provided access to international markets to Mid-America’s farm exporters. Yet, by virtue of an odd feature in the documents used to report trade statistics to Customs and Border Protection (and its predecessor agencies), it has been the State of Louisiana and specifically the Port of New Orleans that is credited for wildly disproportionate shares of America’s agricultural export trade.

That’s because it’s nearly impossible to determine the true state-of-origin of such fungible commodities as wheat, soybeans, or corn. So, back about forty years ago when Congress required the Commerce Department to publish state-of-origin export statistics on a monthly basis, the government’s statisticians threw up their hands and designed a workaround. Rather than asking shippers to identify where exported goods were grown, manufactured, or otherwise produced, the operative blank to be filled out was where those goods had begun their journeys into international trade. And since those journeys largely began at the Port of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana was designated as America’s top farm exporting state.

The export numbers represent a grotesque distortion of agricultural reality. The commodities may exit through ports in Louisiana like New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Gramercy, but Louisiana itself is not a major farming state. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Bayou State ranks only 33rd in terms of receipts earned from agriculture.

So much for today’s sermon on data integrity.

To people living in the West, rivers are chiefly seen as sources of fresh water and places for recreation. We seldom think of them as having much logistical significance. (Sometimes, like most of the citizens of Sacramento, we may have no idea there is a port in the neighborhood that is served by ocean-going vessels.)

But there’s no question that the West’s most important river for moving goods to market is the Columbia River. Indigenous peoples fished the river and used it to trade goods for thousands of years before Europeans first turned up in 1792 to discover the river and rechristen it. Still, the Ports of Kalama, Longview, and Vancouver (WA) are not likely viewed across the country as prominent gateways of international trade.

That, however, is a misinformed view. Consider Exhibit A, which shows how these three river ports compared over the past decade with the principal U.S. West Coast seaports.

Exhibit B shows the same rankings through the first three quarters of 2023.

As Exhibit C discloses, export tonnage shipped from USWC ports has generally been declining as has the number of loaded containers leaving USWC ports for overseas markets. But there are some interesting and perhaps even counterintuitive findings to be teased from the data. For example, despite its reputation as an agricultural export gateway, the Port of Oakland regularly ships less tonnage than the Ports of Kalama and Longview. Through September of this year, Kalama‘s export tonnage has totaled 8,994,329 short tons compared to the 5,893,253 short tons shipped through Oakland.

To be sure, weight isn’t everything. Oakland’s export trade last year amounted to $19.267 billion, according to U.S. Commerce Department statistics. Kalama’s export trade, meanwhile, totaled $6.382 billion. Still, Vancouver ($3.325 billion) and Longview ($3.405 billion) ranked among the nation’s top 40 export ports by dollar value.

Few things are ever constant, though. The dollar value of exports through the three Washington State ports on the Columbia has plummeted this year. Through the first three quarters of 2023, the value of export shipments has declined by 24.3% at Kalama, 26.3% at Vancouver and 21.4% at Longview. Those declines reflected a nearly commensurate year-over-year fall-off in export tonnage of 22.5% at Kalama, 18.3% at Longview, and 18.2% at Vancouver.

To put West Coast export volumes in perspective, export tonnage at the Ports of Kalama, Longview, and Vancouver over the past ten years totaled 304,007,176 short tons, as opposed to the 432,264,262 short tons shipped from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. (However, if the export tonnage through the Port of Portland is added, the four Columbia River ports shipped 425,939,213 short tons, near parity with the export tonnage of the San Pedro Bay ports.)

Over the same decade, the Port of Kalama (with 134,708,649 short tons of exports) and the Port of Longview (104,938,145 short tons) topped the 103,516,632 short tons that were exported from the Port of Oakland.

What accounts for the export volumes shipped through the ports on the right bank of the Columbia? Apples from Washington State? Timber from Oregon? No, it’s the volumes of wheat, corn, and soybeans being exported to Asian markets.

Collectively, the three Washington State ports on the Columbia accounted for 16.7% of the nation’s soybean export tonnage last year. Kalama ranked as the country’s third biggest soybean export port with a 9.7% share, while Longview’s 4.0% share put it in seventh place followed in ninth place by Vancouver’s 3.0% share. Kalama last year was the third leading port for exports of corn (maize) with a 9.4% share of the traffic. To be sure, two Louisiana ports dominate the nation’s corn export trade with New Orleans and Gramercy handling 39.5% and 30.6% shares, respectively, last year. Longview was the fourth leading corn export port with a 4.2% share, while Vancouver was ninth with a 1.5% share.

In tonnage terms, Kalama was the leading port for U.S. wheat exports since attaining that status in 2016. Its 24.0% share of all seaborne export tonnage of wheat and meslin last year easily topped New Orleans’ 19.0% share. The third leading port was Port Houston (17.8%), but in fourth place came Vancouver with a 13.1% share. Although Longview placed sixth with a 4.7% share, we should, to be fair, observe that a port on the Oregon side of the Columbia River, Portland, ranked fifth with an 11.8% share of U.S. exports of wheat and meslin last year.

That’s it for this month’s commentary. As you and yours gather around to celebrate the holidays and the start of a New Year, don’t limit yourself to the usual Christmas songs. Get out your old guitar or banjo and sing along to a recording of the official song of the State of Washington, Woody Guthrie’s “Roll on, Columbia, Roll On.”

Disclaimer: The views expressed in Jock’s commentaries are his own and may not reflect the positions of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association.