Multimodal transport
Carriage under a single contract by at least two successive modes, whose central difficulty is damage that cannot be traced to any one leg.
The United Nations convention on international multimodal transport, signed in Geneva on May 24, 1980, never entered into force: it needed thirty ratifications. Multimodal transport means carrying goods under a single contract by at least two successive modes. The operator answers for the whole journey, even where it subcontracts each segment. No worldwide regime has managed to govern the entire chain. Each mode keeps its own convention, defenses, limits and time bar, so the compensation due for one and the same carton varies with where the damage happened. Contracts therefore adopt the network system: it applies the regime of the leg where the damage is localized, and a fallback regime where it is not. Localization thus becomes the first battleground of every disputed file. This is one of the rare areas where cargo insurance outperforms carriage law: a warehouse to warehouse policy covers the whole chain without regard to segment and leaves the underwriter to pursue recovery afterward. Multimodal carriage is the answer to containerization, which made transfers between modes invisible and the legal partition inherited from single mode carriage absurd.
The 1992 UNCTAD and ICC rules, the basis of FIATA's FBL multimodal bill of lading, set the limit at 666.67 special drawing rights per package or 2 per kilogram where the damage cannot be traced to one leg, and at 8.33 per kilogram where the journey includes no sea or inland waterway leg: one and the same lost container is thus worth four times more if it traveled by road alone.
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