In an October 14, 2009 article entitled "Who Took Our Jobs?", Willamette Week profiled the "port" part of Portland--and how critical it is to the City's and Oregon's economy:

Theory No. 3:

The World Stopped Buying Everything We Ship

...

"Oregon’s jobs depend on selling things overseas. We have a larger share of export-supported employment than all but four other states: Washington, Kansas, South Carolina and Vermont.

"If you have any doubt about what this means, take a drive out to the Port of Portland’s Terminal 5. Sitting 11 miles northwest of Portland on the north bank of the Willamette River, it’s among the largest wooden structures of any kind west of the Mississippi.

"It stores potash—a potassium-rich mineral used to make fertilizer. Potash is mined outside Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and transported by train to Portland, where it is loaded onto ships bound for Japan, Brazil and South Korea. Along with soda ash, it’s the reason Portland is the largest mineral bulk port on the West Coast. (Portland is also the biggest wheat export hub in the United States, but the state’s No. 1 export is computers and electronics.)

"The potash business was terrific in 2008—historically good. The Port shipped 5.46 million tons of bulk minerals last year. But this year, we are on track to export less than half that much.

“You had your feast years and now you have your famine years,” says Port spokesman Josh Thomas.

All those tons of minerals are only a tiny sliver of the problem. Oregon’s overall foreign exports have dropped by 33 percent over the past year, the ninth-worst plunge in the country.

"Demand for everything Oregon ships (with the sole exception of petroleum products) has ceased from pretty much everywhere on the globe. Shipments to South Korea—Oregon’s fifth-largest trade partner—are down by 59 percent. That’s nothing compared with the Philippines and Mexico, which were our eighth- and ninth-largest export destinations until they fell by 71 and 77 percent, respectively. “It’s pretty much Intel’s products,” Oregon economic development division manager Karen Goddin says of those two drop-offs. “Now that production’s been shut down and shifted to China.”

"(China: That’s the one country that still wants to do business with us. Exports to the Commies’ riotous free market went up by 24 percent at the same time other trade partners “dropped off a cliff,” in the words of Oregon’s ports manager, David Harlan. Chinese exports brought Oregon over a billion dollars between January and June of this year, with demand for chemical manufacturing increasing by 73 percent and shipments of waste and scrap up by 115 percent.)

"The formula for translating lost shipping into lost jobs is simple: 10 jobs for every million dollars of annual export sales lost. Oregon has lost $6.5 billion in a year. That’s an estimated 65,000 jobs connected to shipping—all lost at sea."

To read the entire article, click here.

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