Chaos incarnate/The fragility of supply chains ...

The Port of Los Angeles, the main port of entry for goods from Asia, has seen significant congestion in the pandemic.Credit...Coley Brown for The New York Times

Seems the pandemic has raised hell on the shipping of goods all over the world as per the detailed NYTimes' piece titled ‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This’: Chaos Strikes Global Shipping. 

Off the coast of Los Angeles, more than two dozen container ships filled with exercise bikes, electronics and other highly sought imports have been idling for as long as two weeks.

In Kansas City, farmers are struggling to ship soybeans to buyers in Asia. In China, furniture destined for North America piles up on factory floors.

Around the planet, the pandemic has disrupted trade to an extraordinary degree, driving up the cost of shipping goods and adding a fresh challenge to the global economic recovery. The virus has thrown off the choreography of moving cargo from one continent to another.

At the center of the storm is the shipping container, the workhorse of globalization.

The traffic jams off Los Angeles have become so severe that ships have exhausted all the anchorage spots.Credit...Coley Brown for The New York Times

Americans stuck in their homes have set off a surge of orders from factories in China, much of it carried across the Pacific in containers — the metal boxes that move goods in towering stacks atop enormous vessels. As households in the United States have filled bedrooms with office furniture and basements with treadmills, the demand for shipping has outstripped the availability of containers in Asia, yielding shortages there just as the boxes pile up at American ports.

Containers that carried millions of masks to countries in Africa and South America early in the pandemic remain there, empty and uncollected, because shipping carriers have concentrated their vessels on their most popular routes — those linking North America and Europe to Asia.

This happened before, remember 2008?

More than a decade ago, during the global financial crisis, 

shipping companies saw their businesses savaged.

Read the excellent NYTimes article to see just how fragile supply chains truly are.