A leading shippers body has launched a campaign to stop lines from imposing “spurious” surcharges.

The Global Shippers’ Forum (GSF) has set itself the goal of ending the liner shipping practice of imposing container shipping surcharges within five years.

It will seek to eradicate them by 2020 through a series of actions designed to “expose the scale and injustice of the practice to world trade bodies”, according to UK-based secretary-general Chris Welsh.

He says the issue is being taken up alongside a separate campaign to fight against “outrageous” charges implemented in parallel with new rules relating to the mandatory weighing of containers.

The issues formed an integral part of last week’s GSF annual meeting in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The gathering resolved to end the imposition of “often arbitrary charges applied by shipping lines and forwarders to the contracted costs of moving freight containers”.

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