The growing pile at Chittagong port

There is a growing pile, 12 lakh tonnes of goods to be precise, at the Chittagong port. The goods are waiting to be unloaded with the result of extracting demurrage charge of $14,000 per day overstayed. To add to the strike of water transport workers, the weekly hartals called by different political parties have made the pile of sugar, wheat, lentil, salt, fertiliser, cement, clinker and limestone grow at an alarming rate.
The gluts of goods do not just affect the businessmen who are importing these products from outside, these affect us all. With the backlog in unloading these goods, the market prices of certain essential products are going up and we still have to buy our sugar and cement as our need is the only thing that's remaining constant.
The bottom line is, all involved in the supply chain here are disadvantaged. The businessmen paying large sums of unpredicted fees, the workers working extra to not earn more but to carry bigger weights, the consumer coughing up extra takas, as the dysfunctional situation at the port earns it a bad name.
Perhaps it is time that the importers, the water transport workers and the port authority start thinking outside the box. Yes, they may have little control of the weekly political strikes but they can come to an understanding to end the water transport workers' strike who have demanded a raise, especially when there is no end in sight of sudden hartal calls by political parties.
Often if the system is breaking, the solution does not necessarily lie in fixing all the parts, that is a bigger task to take on in the present context. However, partial solution by fixing the parts which are controllable and hope for the rest to fall into places one by one, can prove to be an effective strategy to meet a contingency.