Re:Missing wheat from the war is less than 1% of global whea...
by ineedasername on Thursday March 31, 2022 @06:45PM
(#30873063)
>you only need a sliver of spare capacity
If there was spare capacity, but there doesn't seem to be much at all. 1 in 10 inter-country wheat shipments will be Ukrainian, and it's about 1 in 7 for corn, probably other crops as well. Repurposing that shipping capacity isn't easy either, from a logistics standpoint. It can take up to a month just for a ship to cross the Pacific, before any other route complexities. It doesn't help that there's over 100 such cargo ships tied up in Ukrainian ports either, a decent proportion of which will be the subset of cargo ships fitted out for bulk grain transport.
The last few years have already shown us how delicate the global logistics & supply chains are. It doesn't take much to stretch them near to the breaking point, and we're already close to that point.
If there was spare capacity, but there doesn't seem to be much at all. 1 in 10 inter-country wheat shipments will be Ukrainian, and it's about 1 in 7 for corn, probably other crops as well. Repurposing that shipping capacity isn't easy either, from a logistics standpoint. It can take up to a month just for a ship to cross the Pacific, before any other route complexities. It doesn't help that there's over 100 such cargo ships tied up in Ukrainian ports either, a decent proportion of which will be the subset of cargo ships fitted out for bulk grain transport.
The last few years have already shown us how delicate the global logistics & supply chains are. It doesn't take much to stretch them near to the breaking point, and we're already close to that point.