In Wenatchee, Washington, tens of thousands of boxes of apples that should be on their way to the Middle East and Asia are instead filling the warehouses. The problem isn't a lack of demand: Foreign buyers are eager for produce from Washington and other states. But thanks to the strange effects of Covid-19 on global shipping, US farm exports are hardly moving.
In normal times, "We ship 10 to 15 containers of fruit every week into Taiwan," says Dave Martin, export sales manager for Stemilt Growers in Wenatchee, one of Washington's biggest tree-fruit exporters. "This week, we will not have a ship."
The shortage of cargo space has backed up Stemilt's huge packing operations, also prompting Stemilt's foreign buyers to look to competitors in countries such as Chile, where the apple harvest is just starting.
The cargo-space crisis is the most recent symptom of a global trade system that was unbalanced even before the pandemic, but is now so lopsided that entire sectors are at a virtual standstill.
A wave of mainly Chinese goods has overwhelmed some West Coast ports, especially in Los Angeles, where ships often sit for days waiting to unload. And because some of those ships, once they unload in Los Angeles, go pick up cargo at other West Coast ports, bottlenecks in Southern California have meant major delays for exporters waiting to load their goods in Seattle and Tacoma.
Source: yoursun.com
Photo source: Dreamstime.com
