Arquivo da tag: Cadeia mundial de circulação de bens

Peter S. Goodman, photographs by Erin Schaff

The Port of Savannah in Georgia is the third-largest container port in the United States.

‘It’s Not Sustainable’: What America’s Port Crisis Looks Like Up Close

An enduring traffic jam at the Port of Savannah reveals why the chaos in global shipping is likely to persist.

Published Oct. 10, 2021; Updated Oct. 14, 2021

SAVANNAH, Ga. — Like toy blocks hurled from the heavens, nearly 80,000 shipping containers are stacked in various configurations at the Port of Savannah — 50 percent more than usual.

The steel boxes are waiting for ships to carry them to their final destination, or for trucks to haul them to warehouses that are themselves stuffed to the rafters. Some 700 containers have been left at the port, on the banks of the Savannah River, by their owners for a month or more.

“They’re not coming to get their freight,” complained Griff Lynch, the executive director of the Georgia Ports Authority. “We’ve never had the yard as full as this.”

As he speaks, another vessel glides silently toward an open berth — the 1,207-foot-long Yang Ming Witness, its decks jammed with containers full of clothing, shoes, electronics and other stuff made in factories in Asia. Towering cranes soon pluck the thousands of boxes off the ship — more cargo that must be stashed somewhere.

“Certainly,” Mr. Lynch said, “the stress level has never been higher.”

It has come to this in the Great Supply Chain Disruption: They are running out of places to put things at one of the largest ports in the United States. As major ports contend with a staggering pileup of cargo, what once seemed like a temporary phenomenon — a traffic jam that would eventually dissipate — is increasingly viewed as a new reality that could require a substantial refashioning of the world’s shipping infrastructure.

As the Savannah port works through the backlog, Mr. Lynch has reluctantly forced ships to wait at sea for more than nine days. On a recent afternoon, more than 20 ships were stuck in the queue, anchored up to 17 miles off the coast in the Atlantic.

Nearly 80,000 containers jam the port, 50 percent more than usual.

Such lines have become common around the globe, from the more than 50 ships marooned last week in the Pacific near Los Angeles to smaller numbers bobbing off terminals in the New York area, to hundreds waylaid off ports in China.

The turmoil in the shipping industry and the broader crisis in supply chains is showing no signs of relenting. It stands as a gnawing source of worry throughout the global economy, challenging once-hopeful assumptions of a vigorous return to growth as vaccines limit the spread of the pandemic.

The disruption helps explain why Germany’s industrial fortunes are sagging, why inflation has become a cause for concern among central bankers, and why American manufacturers are now waiting a record 92 days on average to assemble the parts and raw materials they need to make their goods, according to the Institute of Supply Management.

On the surface, the upheaval appears to be a series of intertwined product shortages. Because shipping containers are in short supply in China, factories that depend on Chinese-made parts and chemicals in the rest of the world have had to limit production.

But the situation at the port of Savannah attests to a more complicated and insidious series of overlapping problems. It is not merely that goods are scarce. It is that products are stuck in the wrong places, and separated from where they are supposed to be by stubborn and constantly shifting barriers.

The shortage of finished goods at retailers represents the flip side of the containers stacked on ships marooned at sea and massed on the riverbanks. The pileup in warehouses is itself a reflection of shortages of truck drivers needed to carry goods to their next destinations.

For Mr. Lynch, the man in charge in Savannah, frustrations are enhanced by a sense of powerlessness in the face of circumstances beyond his control. Whatever he does to manage his docks alongside the murky Savannah River, he cannot tame the bedlam playing out on the highways, at the warehouses, at ports across the ocean and in factory towns around the world.

“The supply chain is overwhelmed and inundated,” Mr. Lynch said. “It’s not sustainable at this point. Everything is out of whack.”

Born and raised in Queens with the no-nonsense demeanor to prove it, Mr. Lynch, 55, has spent his professional life tending to the logistical complexities of sea cargo. (“I actually wanted to be a tugboat captain,” he said. “There was only one problem. I get seasick.”)

Now, he is contending with a storm whose intensity and contours are unparalleled, a tempest that has effectively extended the breadth of oceans and added risk to sea journeys.

Last month, his yard held 4,500 containers that had been stuck on the docks for at least three weeks. “That’s bordering on ridiculous,” he said.

That these tensions are playing out even in Savannah attests to the magnitude of the disarray. The third-largest container port in the United States after Los Angeles-Long Beach and New York-New Jersey, Savannah boasts nine berths for container ships and abundant land for expansion.

To relieve the congestion, Mr. Lynch is overseeing a $600 million expansion. He is swapping out one berth for a bigger one to accommodate the largest container ships. He is extending the storage yard across another 80 acres, adding room for 6,000 more containers. He is enlarging his rail yard to 18 tracks from five to allow more trains to pull in, building out an alternative to trucking.

But even as Mr. Lynch sees development as imperative, he knows that expanded facilities alone will not solve his problems.

“If there’s no space out here,” he said, looking out at the stacks of containers, “it doesn’t matter if I have 50 berths.”

Many of the containers are piled five high, making it harder for cranes to sort through the towers to lift the needed boxes when trucks arrive to take them away.

On this afternoon, under a merciless sun, the port is on track to break its record for activity in a single day — more than 15,000 trucks coming and going. Still, the pressure builds. A tugboat escorts another ship to the dock — the MSC AGADIR, fresh from the Panama Canal — bearing more cargo that must be parked somewhere.

In recent weeks, the shutdown of a giant container terminal off the Chinese city of Ningbo has added to delays. Vietnam, a hub for the apparel industry, was locked down for several months in the face of a harrowing outbreak of Covid. Diminished cargo leaving Asia should provide respite to clogged ports in the United States, but Mr. Lynch dismisses that line.

“Six or seven weeks later, the ships come in all at once,” Mr. Lynch said. “That doesn’t help.”

Early this year, as shipping prices spiked and containers became scarce, the trouble was widely viewed as the momentary result of pandemic lockdowns. With schools and offices shut, Americans were stocking up on home office gear and equipment for basement gyms, drawing heavily on factories in Asia. Once life reopened, global shipping was supposed to return to normal.

But half a year later, the congestion is worse, with nearly 13 percent of the world’s cargo shipping capacity tied up by delays, according to data compiled by Sea-Intelligence, an industry research firm in Denmark.

Many businesses now assume that the pandemic has fundamentally altered commercial life in permanent ways. Those who might never have shopped for groceries or clothing online — especially older people — have gotten a taste of the convenience, forced to adjust to a lethal virus. Many are likely to retain the habit, maintaining pressure on the supply chain.

“Before the pandemic, could we have imagined mom and dad pointing and clicking to buy a piece of furniture?” said Ruel Joyner, owner of 24E Design Co., a boutique furniture outlet that occupies a brick storefront in Savannah’s graceful historic district. His online sales have tripled over the past year.

On top of those changes in behavior, the supply chain disruption has imposed new frictions.

Mr. Joyner, 46, designs his furniture in Savannah while relying on factories from China and India to manufacture many of his wares. The upheaval on the seas has slowed deliveries, limiting his sales.

He pointed to a brown leather recliner made for him in Dallas. The factory is struggling to secure the reclining mechanism from its supplier in China.

“Where we were getting stuff in 30 days, they are now telling us six months,” Mr. Joyner said. Customers are calling to complain.

His experience also underscores how the shortages and delays have become a source of concern about fair competition. Giant retailers like Target and Home Depot have responded by stockpiling goods in warehouses and, in some cases, chartering their own ships. These options are not available to the average small business.

Bottlenecks have a way of causing more bottlenecks. As many companies have ordered extra and earlier, especially as they prepare for the all-consuming holiday season, warehouses have become jammed. So containers have piled up at the Port of Savannah.

Mr. Lynch’s team — normally focused on its own facilities — has devoted time to scouring unused warehouse spaces inland, seeking to provide customers with alternative channels for their cargo.

Recently, a major retailer completely filled its 3 million square feet of local warehouse space. With its containers piling up in the yard, port staff worked to ship the cargo by rail to Charlotte, N.C., where the retailer had more space.

Such creativity may provide a modicum of relief, but the demands on the port are only intensifying.

On a muggy afternoon in late September, Christmas suddenly felt close at hand. The containers stacked on the riverbanks were surely full of holiday decorations, baking sheets, gifts and other material for the greatest wave of consumption on earth.

Will they get to stores in time?

“That’s the question everyone is asking,” Mr. Lynch said. “I think that’s a very tough question.”

U.S. Food Supply Chain Is Strained as Virus Spreads (New York Times)

14/04/2020UncategorizedCadeia mundial de circulação de bens, COVID-19, EUA, Segurança alimentarrenzotaddei

By Michael Corkery and David Yaffe-Bellany, April 14, 2020

Disruptions are expected in the production and distribution of products like pork, and localized shortages could occur.

As workers in the industry fall ill, food shortages that started with consumer hoarding could reduce choices for weeks. — Credit…Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

The nation’s food supply chain is showing signs of strain, as increasing numbers of workers are falling ill with the coronavirus in meat processing plants, warehouses and grocery stores.

The spread of the virus through the food and grocery industry is expected to cause disruptions in production and distribution of certain products like pork, industry executives, labor unions and analysts have warned in recent days. The issues follow nearly a month of stockpiling of food and other essentials by panicked shoppers that have tested supply networks as never before.

Industry leaders and observers acknowledge the shortages could increase, but they insist it is more of an inconvenience than a major problem. People will have enough to eat; they just may not have the usual variety. The food supply remains robust, they say, with hundreds of millions of pounds of meat in cold storage. There is no evidence that the coronavirus can be transmitted through food or its packaging, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Still, the illnesses have the potential to cause shortages lasting weeks for a few products, creating further anxiety for Americans already shaken by how difficult it can be to find high-demand staples like flour and eggs.

“You might not get what you want when you want it,” said Christine McCracken, a meat industry analyst at Rabobank in New York. “Consumers like to have a lot of different choices, and the reality is in the short term, we just don’t have the labor to make that happen.”

In one of the most significant signs of pressure since the pandemic began, Smithfield Foods became the latest company to announce a shutdown, announcing Sunday that it would close its processing plant in Sioux Falls, S.D., after 230 workers became ill with the virus. The plant produces more than 5 percent of the nation’s pork.

“The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply,” Smithfield’s chief executive, Kenneth M. Sullivan, said in a statement.

As of Saturday, the plant’s Covid-19 cases were more than half South Dakota’s active total, Gov. Kristi Noem said. She called the outbreak an “alarming statistic” and asked Smithfield to shut down the facility for two weeks.

The problems at the Sioux Falls pork plant show the food processing industry’s vulnerability to an outbreak. Employees often work shoulder to shoulder, and some companies have granted sick leave only to employees who test positive for the coronavirus. That potentially leaves on the job thousands of other infected workers who haven’t been tested, hastening the infection’s spread.

The plant that Smithfield Foods is shutting down in Sioux Falls, S.D., produces more than 5 percent of the nation’s pork. — Credit…Stephen Groves/Associated Press

Other major processors have had to shut down plants. JBS USA, the world’s largest meat processor, closed a plant in Pennsylvania for two weeks. Last week, Cargill closed a facility in Pennsylvania where it produces steaks, ground beef and ground pork. And Tyson halted operations at a pork plant in Iowa after more than two dozen workers tested positive.

“Labor is going to be the biggest thing that can break,” said Karan Girotra, a supply-chain expert at Cornell University. “If large numbers of people start getting sick in rural America, all bets are off.”

At the other end of the supply chain, grocery stores are also dealing with increasing illnesses among workers, as well as absences by those afraid to go in to work.

Even as company officials called them “essential” for their role in feeding the country, grocery store workers went weeks without being provided with face masks and other protective gear.

Some food companies have been slow to provide the gear, while others tried but found that their orders were rerouted to the health care industry, where there is also a dire need. A few grocery workers say they are still waiting to be supplied with masks, despite federal health guidelines that recommend everybody wear one in public.

The workers also face a threat from their exposure to customers, who continue to stock up on food. Some, the workers say, don’t wear masks and fail to keep an adequate level of social distancing.

There are no government agencies tracking illnesses among food industry workers nationwide. The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents 1.3 million grocery store, food processing and meat packing employees, said on Monday that at least 1,500 of its members had been infected with the virus and that 30 of them have died.

“The Covid-19 pandemic represents a clear and present danger to our workers and our nation’s food supply,” U.F.C.W. International’s president, Marc Perrone, said.

Even before the illnesses began to spread through the industry, the supply chain had been tested intensely. Truck drivers, who were already scarce before the pandemic, couldn’t make deliveries fast enough. Hot dog factories and dairy farmers ramped up production in response to waves of panic buying.

Those surges continue to take a toll on a system that had been built largely for customers seeking speed and convenience, not stockpiling. On Sunday, Amazon said it was getting new customers seeking online grocery delivery from Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh to effectively sign up for a wait list. It’s an unusual concession for an internet giant that is used to unimpeded growth.

On some days, shoppers still cannot find flour, eggs or other staples that are in high demand. Retailers and manufacturers have offered reassurances that these shortages are temporary and merely reflect a distribution and production network that cannot work fast enough.

The parts of the food system that will suffer the worst disruptions are the ones dependent on heavily consolidated supply chains that employ large numbers of people, Mr. Girotra of Cornell said.

The Smithfield plant in South Dakota is a stark example of a vulnerable link in the chain. On its own, it produces 130 million servings of food per week. It employs 3,700 people, many of whom work closely together deboning and cutting up meat.

Last week, South Dakota officials watched the number of cases there increase at an alarming rate. Smithfield said it would shut down the building for three days to sanitize the facility. But as the number of Covid-19 cases surpassed more than half of all cases in Sioux Falls and the surrounding county, state officials asked the plant to close for 14 days “to protect the employees, the families, the Sioux Falls community and the people of South Dakota,” Governor Noem said on Saturday.

The next day, Smithfield said it would shut down “until further notice” and pay its workers for the next two weeks.

The state has not reported outbreaks at any other meat processing plants. South Dakota officials said Smithfield had ramped up testing of its employees, suggesting that this could have resulted in rates that were higher than in other populations in the state.

Some big food producers are coming up with contingency plans. Absences have risen at some plants run by the Mississippi-based chicken processor Sanderson Farms, though not at a level that would significantly disrupt production, said Mike Cockrell, the company’s chief financial officer.

The company has explored alternatives in case large numbers of its workers become sick. Much of the labor at a processing plant involves deboning chicken and dividing it into cuts like breasts, thighs and wings. A reduced staff could continue packaging chicken but skip the labor-intensive process of dividing up the birds.

“You could change your mix and produce a less consumer-friendly product with fewer people,” Mr. Cockrell said. “That’s not a disaster.”

At the grocery store, he said, “you would see a whole chicken, and you could take that chicken home.”

In the grocery industry, many of the solutions to keeping the supply chain functioning are also simple, workers say. The U.F.C.W., for instance, is urging states to mandate that shoppers wear masks and appealing to customers to “shop smart” by refraining from touching products, using a shopping list and making fewer trips to the store.

Aaron Squeo, who works in the meat department at a Kroger supermarket in Madison Heights, Mich., said customers needed to practice better social distancing.

“I have seen whole families out like it’s an outing,” Mr. Squeo said. “This can’t continue like this. We need to truly change how we shop. Our lives are at stake.”

Julie Creswell contributed reporting.

How Will The COVID-19 Pandemic Affect Global Food Supplies? Here’s What We Know (RFE/RL)

11/04/2020UncategorizedCadeia mundial de circulação de bens, COVID-19, Crise, Economia, Produção de alimentosrenzotaddei

A Pakistani worker in Karachi sorts wheat grain on April 7 to make flour to keep people fed during the country's lockdown amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. — A Pakistani worker in Karachi sorts wheat grain on April 7 to make flour to keep people fed during the country’s lockdown amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Photo: Shahzaib Akber (EPA-EFE)

Original article

April 09, 2020 14:55 GMT

By RFE/RL

That strawberry you’re eating while self-isolating from the coronavirus?

Chances are it came from a farm. Or it may have come from a large agricultural operation many, many kilometers away from your home, harvested by hand, possibly by migrant workers brought in from other towns, cities, or even countries.

But can that system continue to bring you strawberries as the global coronavirus pandemic continues? Or bread? Pasta? Cooking oil?

The coronavirus has already sent the global economy into a tailspin, with tens of millions of people being put out of work, as factories from Wuhan to Bavaria to Michigan suspend operations.

What does this mean for the food we eat?

If you live in a rural setting in a temperate climate where the growing season is under way, you might be preparing to eat produce from your backyard or your dacha.

But if you live in a city – as more than half the world’s population does — chances are you rely on the global food supply chain to make sure your bread and milk, or noodles and bananas, are in stock at the market.

What happens when the people picking our fruits and vegetables get sick or have to quarantine? What happens when the packers who make sure the potatoes and onions are boxed and put onto trucks to be driven to towns and cities can’t work? What happens when wheat can’t be milled or shipped to bakeries to be baked into bread and sold at markets and food stores?

Could we be facing global food shortages in the coming months?

A man stands in front of empty shelves in a supermarket in Moscow on March 17.

“Massive disruptions to global food supply system will result from the pandemic,” Chris Elliot, a professor at Queen’s University in Belfast, wrote in a post on Twitter.

Here’s what we know about how the coronavirus is affecting food supplies.

What’s Going On?

In mid-March, the pandemic was accelerating in most countries, even as a handful began to show signs of “flattening the curve” – the term used for slowing the rate of new infections.

But the stress on the global food supply system was already clear.

“A protracted pandemic crisis could quickly put a strain on the food supply chains, a complex web of interactions involving farmers, agricultural inputs, processing plants, shipping, retailers, and more,” Maximo Cullen, the chief economist for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, warned in a paper.

Panic buying and hoarding in some places added to worries that retailers and wholesalers whose inventories might be small already could be wiped out.

By early April, the World Food Program – another UN agency – tried to reassure nervous consumers.

“Global markets for basic cereals are well-supplied and prices generally low,” the program said in a report released on April 3.

“Disruptions are so far minimal; food supply is adequate, and markets are relatively stable,” spokeswoman Elizabeth Byrs was quoted as saying.

“But we may soon expect to see disruptions in food supply chains” if big importers lose confidence in the reliable flow of basic food commodities, she said.

Workers load a truck with food aid in Bydgoszcz, Poland, on April 8. Two Polish companies, Polski Cukier and Polskie Przetwory, donated food products to help those most in need because of the coronavirus pandemic.

For industrialized nations, whose food supply chains were already undergoing a shift due to changing consumer habits and tastes, that bodes for more uncertainty.

“We’re talking about a radical change to a food chain that was already going through a radical chain,” James Tillotson, a retired professor of food policy and international business at the Friedman School at Tufts University in the United States, told RFE/RL.

Who’s Most At Risk?

For major industrial nations, whose populations tend to be particularly concentrated in urban and suburban centers, the food supply chains are longer, more complex, and, possibly, more vulnerable.

For less industrial, more rural, and agrarian economies, supply chains tend to be shorter and simpler. If you’re not getting your eggs and milk from chickens and cows and goats in your backyard, for example, then you might be getting them from the farmers in the next village over.

Other commodity goods — such as wheat, corn, or soybeans — are sold and shipped in bulk, often over long distances. That means there are more points where the supply chain can be disrupted.

Add to that the fear factor: Consumers fearing the possibility of shortages rush to buy more than they otherwise would, thus causing the shortages they’d feared. Some food markets in Moscow, for example, reported shelves being emptied of ready-to-eat buckwheat.

Grain Drain: Coronavirus Concerns Drive Russians To Buy Up Buckwheat

That’s led some countries to cut back on food exports in a bid to ensure they have enough food for their own citizens.

Vietnam, a major exporter of rice, has suspended exports of that product and other commodities. India, a major producer of rice, like Vietnam, has also suspended exports.

In Kazakhstan, one of the world’s major exporters of wheat, the government has restricted exports of that commodity. Earlier, the government had suspended exports of other goods like onions, sugar, sunflower oil, and even buckwheat – a grain that has emotional resonance for many older Kazakhs and Russians as a way to ward off hunger.

Last month, Russia, the world’s largest wheat producer, suspended exports of processed grains such as buckwheat, rice, and oat flakes.

Restricted supplies have pushed up prices, not only locally but globally in some cases.

In the Boston area, for example, the price of a dozen eggs has tripled in recent weeks, Tillotson said.

Higher prices and supply restrictions have created opportunities for black marketeers. Police in Kyrgyzstan this week detained shipments of milled wheat flour that was being smuggled out of the country in sacks labeled “cement.”

In an unusual public appeal, activists, academics, and a group of executives for some of the world’s biggest food-processing companies warned on April 9 that the number of people going hungry around the world could increase dramatically in the coming months.

Sacks of flour stacked at a storage facility in Novosibirsk, Russia. Production of bread, grains, and pasta has been boosted in the Novosibirsk region due to increased demand amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There could not be a more important time in which to keep trade flows open and predictable,” according to the letter addressed to world leaders.

The letter urged food exporters to keep supplying international markets, and also called for supporting populations most at risk of hunger, as well as investing in local production.

Who’s Harvesting?

The process of picking crops and packing them for shipment is itself under stress, experts warned, as field workers struggle to get protective equipment to shield them from coronavirus infection or as workers are prevented from traveling to farms by lockdowns and travel restrictions.

“The issue of the health of the farm labor force as well as labor availability is one of the biggest challenges to production,” risk analyst group Fitch Solutions said in a March 25 report.

In the United States, migrant workers comprise the bulk of farm and agriculture labor. And in California, one of the leading U.S. states for producing food and agricultural goods, state officials have imposed a stay-at-home order to minimize people moving around and transmitting infection. That has affected farm labor.

The same holds true across Europe, where farms are doing spring planting and struggling to find workers to pick crops like strawberries and lettuce after border closures among European Union member choked off the flow of foreign laborers.

“At this point, it concerns vegetable growers who need manpower, both indoors and outdoors, in terms of sowing and doing spring work,” Stojan Marinkovic, president of the Republika Srpska Farmers’ Association, told RFE/RL’s Balkan Service. “We are aware that this is a large group of people working in one place, so they have to take care of protecting both themselves and the people around them.”

Sooner or later, however, coronavirus infections will fall, governments will ease restrictions on travel and retailers, and supply chains will revert to normal, experts predict.

At that point, people may face a different problem: what to do with all the extra goods in their larders, cupboards, and freezers.

“If people are buying more goods now, it is not necessarily because they are using more — they are stockpiling. When things get back to normal, consumers will have a lot of canned soup and toilet paper at home and won’t need to buy more,” Goker Aydin, an operations management expert at the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University, said.

Uma (in)certa antropologia

An (un)certain anthropology