Pulse Industry Concerned Over Container Access

The backlog of ships and cargo continued to grow every day that the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal.

 

Salvage efforts have been underway since one of the world's largest container ships got stuck on Tuesday, and have since been successful in freeing the ship.

 

Greg Northey, Pulse Canada's Vice President of Corporate Affairs says it definitely will have an impact on pulse export movements.

 

"Anything that would be going and obviously various routes products can move but lentils, peas, chickpeas would be going through there depending on the destination. Whether they're moving to Asia or other destinations and obviously we do ship a lot of product there. So, for sure is it the major route."

 

He notes they've already seen unprecedented issues with sourcing containers over the last year and now this will have a domino effect as loaded vessels sat and waited for the Ever Given to be freed causing more delays to the entire containerized system.

 

"If you're a shipper, who has scheduled a container vessel, and all of a sudden you can't get on that vessel because you can't get containers it means that a farmer may not be able to deliver their crop at the time they want. So the delay there, obviously for them is the potential for cash flow issues."

 

He notes another key concern for Canadian shippers is the potential for a strike at the Port of Montreal.

 

"Just the threat of a disruption is causing problems with that supply chain. So, you know, on March 11, in preparation for a potential strike there, railways weren't even shipping containers to Montreal. So all of a sudden, you are blocked out of a major port, which takes about 1.8 million tonnes of grain a year, a lot of it from Western Canada. And so if you are trying to avoid a disruption there, or even in Vancouver, if there's no containers there, you know, you're looking at costs of $400 to $800 per container, just to try and reroute through Halifax or St. John or some other routes. And so, you can imagine, especially for grain products in the container you're eating away at that margin. You know, on top of that, if you're stuck in Vancouver with your product in a container, you're paying demurrage costs daily or detention costs and the shipping runs daily on those containers, which can be you know, hundreds of dollars a day as well. So, it all adds up for everyone."

 

The threat of the strike at the Port of Montreal along with the problems in accessing containers was compounded by the problems in the Suez Canal which is also held up container movement.