Transshipment enables traffic consolidation and the related scale economies in ship size, rationalization of shipping routes and adjustment of ship capacity to traffic density, and expanding the number of ports covered by the shipping network.
As the book explains, the U.S.'s own Drug Enforcement Agency DEAA) has concluded that the "FARC involvement in the drug trade mainly involves the taxation of coca, which does not involve cocaine manufacturing, trafficking, and transshipment".
Both require terminals with high-capacity transshipment cranage and considerable space for internal traffic movement and storage.
The country's border with the United States has long made it a natural transshipment point for all kinds of illegal trafficking including drugs, guns and migrants.
Drug trafficking has soared, making Haiti a major transshipment point for drugs headed to the United States.
The container throughput of transshipment sea ports has a significant negative effect on bulk traffic, whereas that of transshipment river ports has a positive effect.
Several years ago, as border crackdowns in California and Texas funneled illegal immigrant traffic into Arizona, Phoenix supplanted Los Angeles as the prime transshipment point in the Southwest for human smuggling, federal investigators say.
A 12-month season has been attained for traffic moving between the west and Dudinka, the major transshipment port at the mouth of the Yenisey.
A second problem is that drug trafficking, especially in a country like Mexico, where transshipment is the primary activity, uses relatively little labor.
Furthermore, the transshipment function of a bulk port plays a significant role in port traffic changes, but this role is affecting sea ports differently to river ports.
