News / Customs clearance the main bottleneck at Mexican ports as traffic builds

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Rising traffic has strained capacity at Mexico’s seafreight gateways and stretched waiting times for importers, with customs clearance one of the main bottlenecks.

Mexico’s logistics infrastructure is struggling with the growth in international cargo flows. Industry executives and interest groups have called for broad measures to facilitate traffic, above all for investment in infrastructure, from ports to roads and rail.

Not surprisingly, the nation’s main gateways for ocean traffic have emerged as major bottlenecks.

According to official port statistics, overall box traffic was up 14.8% in the first eight months of the year, over the same period in 2023. At Lazaro Cardenas, container throughput surged 28.7% in the January-September period.

The increase in traffic has pushed average import container dwell time to 11 days, well beyond the seven-day grace period before storage charges kick in.

Pick-up times of containers by truck actually improved in September at the four largest gateways, to an average of 4 hours and 44 minutes. The biggest chunk of time was taken up by Customs (2 hours, 19 minutes), while handling took an hour and three minutes, and truckers spent on average one hour and 22 minutes waiting.

At the port of Lazaro Cardenas, it took truckers, on average, six hours to pick up a container last month. Nearly half of the time, 2.9 hours, was consumed by customs formalities.

At the Mexican Association of Intermodal Transport’s recent Intermodal Transport Congress, Francisco Orozco, commercial director of Hutchison Ports Mexico, called for a joint effort by logistics industry associations and customs authorities to find solutions, including an evaluation of a possible extension of customs operations to 24 hours a day.

He added that it was necessary to digitalise processes.

Chances of 24/7 customs look slim, though. The agency has blamed a shortage of staff for its inability to speed up, so it is unlikely to find the manpower to operate around the clock.

On the bright side, the improvement in box processing time at Lazaro Cardenas was partly the result of an upgrade of the resources of the local customs agency. Still, more needs to be done.

John Willy, president of the Latin American Federation of Customs Brokers, said the authorities should strive to improve measures aimed at facilitating the flow of merchandise and not only focus on national security. For its part, the industry should join forces to develop solutions that can get the attention of the authorities, he added.