Trade Experts on Port Congestion Part 2

Thanks for joining us to hear part two of U.S. port congestion making it hard for agricultural commodities to ship overseas. Ray Bowman of California is an international trade consultant and chairs the District Export Council of Southern California.

Even if export companies have a ship to carry their goods, Bowman says finding empty containers can be almost impossible at times.

“We're still dealing with container shortages. So, the pool of containers is not such that we're getting a hold of the containers that we need to stage the cargo, and that's a big problem. I think warehousing in America is close to something like only three percent availability in America’s warehousing. That's close to the full capacity of all warehouses. When that happens, there's no place to offload containers, which means that makes a container shortage even worse, because you have to be empty containers to make them available.”

Bowman also directs the Small Business Development Center of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties in California. He says the ports can make it hard on truckers to offload their goods.

“What happens, too, is what a lot of truckers experience is their terminals that want what they call dual transactions. In other words, if you have a container to drop off, then you better have one to pick up. And, on paper, it helps with productivity. But if you don't have that, then that's a problem, and you got to look for that.”