THE SEA of cranes extends as far as the eye can see at Antwerp port. They stand to attention like soldiers along the 160km (99 miles) of quays at Europe’s second-biggest port, lifting all manner of produce from the hundreds of ships that queue up every week along the river Scheldt to unload their cargoes.
The port is Europe’s second-biggest, covering about 13,000 hectares (32,124 acres) and employing 65,000 people.
It is critical to the local economy, accounting for 6 per cent of Belgium’s gross domestic product, and is at the centre of a bitter diplomatic dispute between Belgium and the Netherlands.
The row erupted in August when the Dutch council of state, which acts as an advisory body to the government and supreme court, halted a plan to deepen the Scheldt on both sides of the Dutch and Belgian border to enable the world’s biggest container ships to access Antwerp port.
It ruled the dredging would harm the environment and several measures proposed by the Dutch to compensate for the work were deemed insufficient to let the dredging go ahead.
The decision has enraged the port of Antwerp and the Flemish government, which has been asking for the dredging work to begin since 1998.
Currently the biggest container ships that measure almost 400m (1,312ft) in length can only enter and leave Antwerp at high tide.
This causes delays and traffic jams on the Scheldt, which cost the port up to €70 million a year and threaten to make it less efficient than its Dutch neighbour Rotterdam port.
“Without deepening, more ships will go to Rotterdam,” says Marc Van Peel, president of the port of Antwerp. “Patience is clearly exhausted, and there is collective indignation about the attitude of the Netherlands.”
Flemish prime minister Kris Peeters took the unusual step of summoning the Dutch ambassador to his office to express his “deep concern” at the delay to dredging, and last week Belgian foreign minister Yves Leterme raised the issue with his Dutch counterpart at a meeting in The Hague.
In Antwerp, angry local politicians have been distributing leaflets calling on citizens to boycott mussels imported from the Dutch region of Zeeland, which supplies 60 per cent of the shellfish for Belgian’s national dish.
“You blockaded the Westerschelde (estuary on the river Scheldt) in the 16th, 17th and 18th century, turning Antwerp into a ghost town. The same thing is happening again. If the Westerschelde isn’t dredged soon, 180,000 jobs are at risk,” Flemish MP Annick De Ridder told Dutch journalists.
At the largest container terminal in Antwerp port, work continues as normal, with cranes unloading the multicoloured containers of goods from ships and stacking them on the quayside like Lego bricks.
But the controversy over the council of state’s decision is causing concern among big investors in the port. “We do not want to invest in other ports, but if the Scheldt is not deepened this may be the case. But we still hope the Dutch people will do what they promised to do,” says Dirk Oellibrandt, general manager of MSC Home Terminal, which employs 900 people in Antwerp.
At one of the huge fruit wharfs operated by the company, Sea-invest employees are also worried about the impact of the dredging delay on the port.
“A deal is a deal and the two countries must live up to their commitments. If the deepening does not happen that will affect the future of Antwerp port,” says one fork-lift truck driver carrying pallets of bananas.
But if the economic costs are being felt most keenly on the Belgian side of the border, the political costs could yet fall in the Netherlands. Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende has been summoned before the Dutch parliament to explain why he personally intervened to veto the key environmental measure proposed to compensate for the dredging work.
The measure involved returning a piece of reclaimed land in Zeeland to the sea by removing a polder – a tract of land enclosed by dykes.
Two expert commissions had advised that removing the polder was the best way to restore the natural balance after the dredging. So when Balkenende’s government vetoed the measure in April, environmental NGOs lodged the challenge to the dredging, which was later upheld by the council of state.
Removing polders and dykes is an emotional issue for Zeelanders, who suffered a devastating flood in 1953 that killed 1,835 people.
Balkenende, who is originally from the region, is well aware of local sensitivities. He must now counter charges that he risked sparking the Netherlands’ biggest diplomatic dispute with Belgium for decades for domestic political gain. Meanwhile, his government is struggling to find a way to honour its 2005 treaty with Belgium within the legal limits set by the council of state.