The global economic crisis is having a direct impact on containerised traffic at France’s major ports.

At the port of Le Havre, France’s number one for containerised traffic, volumes handled in October dropped to 2.3bn tonnes, 6.6 per cent less than a year earlier.

At the port of Marseille, the drop has been even more severe, with volumes falling by 15 per cent in October compared with the year before, and traffic at the containerised terminal of Fos decreasing by 20 per cent.