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Farmers in Kansas City don’t know how to deliver their home grown soybeans to their buyers in Asia. In China, factories stockpile furniture for North America.
Across the globe, the pandemic has severely disrupted trade, increasing the cost of freight transport and posing a new challenge to global economic recovery. The virus has reversed a well-structured pattern of cargo transport from one continent to another.
At the heart of this entire storm is a cargo container, the workhorse of globalization.
Americans, trapped in their homes, increased orders for Chinese factories, and most of those products were transported across the Pacific Ocean in containers, metal boxes that were stacked from huge ships onto giant ships.
As homes in the United States are cluttered with office furniture in their bedrooms and treadmills in basements, there has been a huge demand for containers, outstripping their supply in Asia and in short supply, while boxes are piling up. in American ports.
Containers that transported millions of masks to African and South American countries at the start of the pandemic remain empty and useless as road carriers have turned their attention to the most popular routes, those connecting North America and Europe with Asia.
Meanwhile, in ports where cargo ships enter, they are often trapped in congested waters for several days and unable to unload cargo. The pandemic and its limitations mean a shortage of dockworkers and truck drivers, resulting in delays in delivering cargo, for example, from Southern California to Singapore.
Every container that cannot be unloaded in one place is a container that cannot be loaded in another place.
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