[260320.EN.BIZ] Coronavirus Disruption of Supply Chain Threatens Food Supply

CONTAINER shortage that's left everything behind from Thai curry to Canadian peas stands to get much worse as China slows incoming vessels to suppress the pandemic, reports Bloomberg.

Unloading holdups in China and delays on the return of vessels when the outbreak was largely limited to Asia has left shippers waiting for hundreds of thousands of containers to move goods.

But as the disease goes global, the Port of Fuzhou is to quarantine incoming ships from countries including the US for 14 days. That threatens to exacerbate the container crunch.

"That's millions of tons of capacity that's wiped off the board," said Greg Cherewyk, president of Pulse Canada, Winnipeg, Manitoba-based industry group that represents the nation's growers, traders and processors of pulses like peas and lentils. "An industry like ours, we depend on containers."

Containers bringing consumer goods from Asia are normally unloaded with goods then filled with exports of other commodities. Brazil usually ships meat, pulp and coffee in containers to China, a journey that takes a month each way, while Canada uses them to ship everything from specialty crops to lumber, plywood and paper.

The availability of containers at Hamburg, Rotterdam and Antwerp and Long Beach and Los Angeles are at the lowest levels recorded. Imports to Los Angeles and Long Beach, which have a 35 per cent share of containers coming into the US, fell as much as 13 per cent in the first two months of the first quarter, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Lee Klaskow said. International volume could begin to increase as Chinese exports pick up, he said.

Canada doesn't have enough shipping containers to export some of its pea and lentil crops and exports are running as much as two months behind after 30 vessels from China canceled their sailing to Vancouver since January, Mr Cherewyk said.

Brazilian coffee sellers have been struggling to secure forward bookings due to the shortage as many containers leaving to China aren't returning.

US pork exporters are also crimped by a tighter supply, though that's partly since they are moving record high volume to China, said Laurie Bryant, executive director of the Meat Importers Council of America.

Source : HKSG.