Coffee, toilet paper and gasoline: what products will soon be in short supply around the world due to the blockade of the ship Ever Given in the Suez Canal

The Suez Canal remains blocked after the large container ship Ever Given failed on Tuesday, leaving 237 ships waiting to cross the passage between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, which It has caused millions of losses for shipping, 10% of which pass through this route.

Most of the ships, 107, are in the Suez region, where the port is congested and they must have anchored in the gulf between mainland Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula.

According to data from Leth Agencies, which offers logistics services in different canals and straits around the world, of the total number of vessels stopped, 64 are ships of different products, in addition to 22 tankers and 53 container shipsThe canal is one of the preferred routes for goods between Europe and Asia.

Faced with this situation, freight transport experts have already anticipated that global companies could suffer from a shortage of many items.

The world’s largest producer of wood pulp, the raw material used to create toilet paper, warned in a report from Bloomberg that this global ocean container crisis would likely delay shipments of wood pulp and, therefore, the availability of toilet paper in the shops.

Walter Schalka, CEO of Suzano, which is responsible for a third of the pulp used to make toilet paper worldwide, said Bloomberg this competition for shipping containers would likely delay Suzano’s shipments by at least a month.

The prices of toilet paper could also increase, because delays in ports, even outside the Suez Canal, increase the price of overseas shipments.

Bloomberg also revealed that the stranded cargo ship is also blocking the passage of containers filled with Robusta coffee, the type used at Nescafé for its instant coffee. Europe is hardest hit as it imports via Suez, but the impact will be felt globally as shipping delays exacerbate container shortages that have disrupted food markets.

“Traders will find it difficult to supply their customers in Europe,” said Jan Luhmann, founder of JL Coffee Consulting and former senior coffee buyer at Jacobs Douwe Egberts BV, one of the world’s largest coffee roasters. “It will take a few days to fix this problem if we’re lucky, but still a lot of damage has already been done.”

Only two major robusta coffee producers, Brazil and Côte d’Ivoire, do not use the Suez Canal to reach major European consumers.

Due to a container shortage, coffee roasters in mainland Europe had already struggled to source from Vietnam, the world’s largest producer of robusta. Just as uptime started to improve, channel blocking brought another headache. All grain that Europe imports from East Africa and Asia goes through Suez.

“Can roasters handle delays of two to three weeks? Probably not, ”said Raphaelle Hemmerlin, logistics manager for Swiss coffee distributor Sucafina SA. “I don’t think they have the reserve inventory they normally have.”

On the other hand, delays in deliveries furniture. The pandemic home office lifestyle has contributed to the rise of the home improvement industries. But now, many consumers have found that delivery dates for their remotely purchased furniture have been pushed back by several months.

Dan Flickinger, CEO of Kasala, a Seattle furniture chain, said The Washington Post At the beginning of March, orders placed this month should not arrive in your store until December. “A lot of our furniture is handmade and requires a lot of components. a single missing part can ruin the entire production“, He said.

In addition, the prices of gasoline they could continue to shoot. Values ​​jumped last month due to increased demand and OPEC’s slowness to increase production. The blockade of the Suez Canal is expected to drive up prices.

David Fyfe, chief economist at Argus Media, told the channel NBC News that oil shipments through the Suez Canal represent between 5% and 10% of world shipments.

London-based analytics service Lloyd’s List has calculated that the blockade of the canal results in the withholding of goods worth approximately $ 9,600 million per day with traffic to the west valued at $ 5.1 billion and to the east at $ 4.5 billion per day.

On the other hand, a report prepared by analysts from the French insurer Euler Hermes, a subsidiary of the German group Allianz, estimates that the closure of the canal could cost between 6,000 and 10,000 million dollars (between 5,100 and 8,500 million euros) per day for world trade.

Likewise, it subtracts between 0.2 and 0.4 percentage point per week from the expected growth in trade in 2021 and It represents “the last straw” of supply chain disruptions since the start of the year due to issues such as shortages of containers or semiconductors.

Moody’s also stressed that the blockade of the chain “could not have happened at a worse time” since the supply chains are “very vulnerable” due to the global situation.

With information from EFE

KEEP READING: