Whether and just when aid shipments arrive for those in dire need can be crucial for human lives. HHLA’s Polzug Intermodal affiliate can be relied on here: Since 1993 it has been transporting containers with the vital cargoes out to crisis regions east of the EU.

News from the Caucasus and Central Asia is often bad. Wars, droughts and earthquakes have made many people there dependent on humanitarian organizations that send them rice, flour and water, and often clothes and tents as well. As elsewhere, the receptacle most frequently used for transport is the container, and HHLA’s Polzug Intermodal affiliate is a specialist in difficult container transport runs eastwards. The firm transports between 10,000 and 25,000 standard containers whose contents have been collected together by aid organizations like CARE or USAid.

Back in 1993, one of Polzug’s first large container loads consisted of aid for the victims of Chernobyl. Then as now, the really big donors are the Americans, whose cargo arrives in Europe through Bremerhaven.

From there the containers roll on to Polzug’s terminal in Slavkov, where they are transferred from normal-gauge railcars direct to Russian broad-gauge. Several routes lead on from Poland to Asia, those through the Caucasus being very insecure, especially in Chechnya. Polzug normally uses the rail ferry from Odessa to Poti, one of the reasons being that its Silk Road Express subsidiary has a staff of six in this Georgian port. When required, aid shipments can be sorted or loaded on to trucks there. The port of Poti was damaged during the war with Russia a few months ago but is again fully operational. Now that the most of the humanitarian aid for war victims in Georgia has reached its destination, the current challenge for Polzug is to transport 10;000 tons of food in containers to Afghanistan.

The route via the Caspian Sea and across the steppes of Central Asia is a nightmare for inexperienced project managers, but already almost routine for Helmuth Lüdders. He has organized many such shipments and is aware of the snags – even if new ones are always cropping up.

Turkmenistan, for example, has just started demanding to see special certificates for edible oils. If such trivial items are missing, a whole consignment can remain stuck at the border. "A few years, ago the Ukrainian Customs were holding up our containers for ages before import," reports Lüdders, "and that led to Customs complications again on export because we were unable to observe the prescribed transit period." The real difficulty is to calculate the costs for such transport runs, since they are all but impossible to plan.

Post-carriage runs with trucks are also repeatedly causing surprises. Since there are no container chassis in Central Asia, crazy supporting contraptions are always being cobbled together. After one accident, recalls Lüdders, a driver carried out emergency repairs: "The goods arrived, we at Polzug always manage that, but the 40-ft box was no more than 37 feet long."