Crisis at sea: understand the container shortage affecting producers worldwide

After months of stoppage due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the return to commercial activities came stronger and faster than the container and shipping industry was prepared to handle, raising the price of freight and increasing the timeframes for the export and import of products.

Because of this, last week, the Parliamentary Front for Agriculture (FPA) sent an official letter to the Minister of Infrastructure, Tarcísio Gomes de Freitas, asking for short-term actions to resolve these problems. Sector entities also signed the letter.

The lack of containers is mainly driven by the high demand in large export ports such as Asia, the United States, and Europe, which attract shipowners because they are more profitable compared to other countries such as Brazil, explains Wagner Rodrigo Cruz de Souza, executive director of ABTTC (the Brazilian association of retro port terminals and container-transporting companies).

Souza says that at the height of the pandemic, these nations were not exporting at the current intensity, and, therefore, Brazil had no problems. Now, fierce competition has ended up taking more containers and ships to these other routes.

In addition, due to the drop in purchases and sales, the container sector put a brake on the production of new containers during the pandemic. With the reheating of the world economy, new containers cannot be supplied quickly, says Thiago Pera, a professor at the Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture (Esalq) at the University of São Paulo (USP).

Source: G1

To read the full original article, visit the link:

https://g1.globo.com/economia/agronegocios/noticia/2021/09/09/crise-no-mar-entenda-a-escassez-de-conteineres-que-afeta-producers-do-mundo-todo.ghtml

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