THE BIGGEST players in the biggest markets garner the spotlight when trade is disrupted. But the experiences of smaller players in niche markets are just as telling — and can provide a more nuanced view.

For perspective on how current disruptions compare to those during the supply chain crisis, Lloyd’s List spoke in-depth with executives of Greenfield LLC, a small exporter of containerised and breakbulk forest products from the southeast US and South America.

Greenfield’s business has been affected by the drought in Panama; the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea; the port-closing crash of Dali (IMO: 9697428) in Baltimore, Maryland; and the IT breakdown in Charleston, South Carolina.

“In my opinion, this is just going to be the way it is — it’s not going to get any easier,” said Greenfield maritime logistics manager Susie Thomson.

“There are always going to be problems. The world is importing and exporting so much more than it ever has because there’s more people on the planet.

“There are so many moving parts in getting a 40-foot container from the United States to the port of discharge. It sounds so simple, but it’s not, and if one thing goes wrong, there’s a domino effect.”

Export routes from Americas to Asia

According to Greenfield director Gregorio Aznarez, the company exported 3,300 feu of logs, lumber, and wood chips in 2023, 44% from North America, 56% from South America.

Exports from the US are containerised and load in Charleston; Savannah, Georgia; and Norfolk, Virginia. South American exports are loaded in Montevideo, Uruguay; and Rio Grande and Navigantes, Brazil.

Greenfield keeps a mix of 50% contract, 50% spot, with contracts (often quarterly) negotiated through the Pacific Northwest Asia Shippers Association and spot volumes booked through freight forwarders.

Greenfield also exports forest products via breakbulk out of South America, chartering around six to eight handysize loggers per year, mainly loading in Montevideo.

Greenfield’s forest products are exported to China, India, Vietnam, and elsewhere in Asia Pacific. Logs and lumber, which are mostly pine, are mainly used for building materials and furniture. Wood chips are used for pulp and paper production.

Supply chain crisis vs current disruptions

Greenfield’s biggest challenge during the pandemic-era supply chain crisis was not freight rates, as was the case on the importer side. Rather, it was the extreme difficulty in actually moving the cargo.

“There weren’t enough trucks available and there weren’t enough people to work,” recalled Aznarez.

According to Thomson, “The vessels were not moving. The ports became congested with containers waiting to be loaded or import containers waiting to be pulled off the dock. It came to a standstill.

“It was very difficult for us to get containers — we couldn’t get the empties to load our products. And even if you did have products loaded in containers at the yard, you couldn’t deliver it to the ports.”

The situation is very different today, with no shortage of trucks or workers and no significant demand-driven congestion at US ports. However, there are starting to be signs of container equipment shortfalls.

Aznarez pointed to a disparity in export freight pricing that appears to be driven by container equipment demand.

Greenfield’s average rates from the US east coast to India’s west coast are up almost 40% since the beginning of this year. These boxes used to go on containerships transiting the Red Sea; now they go around the Cape of Good Hope.

Greenfield’s exports to Vietnam have faced an even longer diversion. Much of those cargoes used to go via the Panama Canal but have shifted to the Cape of Good Hope due to Panama’s drought. Greenfield’s average rate from the US east coast to Vietnam is down 35% year to date.

“Vietnam is demanding containers, so they need to get the containers loaded with whatever export they can,” Aznarez explained.

In addition to giving exporters a rate break to send containers back to Asia, Thomson believes ocean carriers are also starting to accelerate empty loadings on backhauls to Asia.

“Import rates into the US have been increasing greatly over the last several months and shipping lines are loading empty containers like they did during Covid, to get them back over there,” she said.

Container shortfalls are “starting to affect us”, said Thomson. She had a booking out of a southeast US port on June 12 and the port “did not have any high-cube containers. None.”

Another parallel to the pandemic-era disruptions: transit times are much longer, this time due to canal diversions, not ship queues at ports.

According to Aznarez, “This negatively affects the financial performance of our customers’ business, because their business is based on letters of credit, which are based on lines of credit with their banks, which are obviously charging interest. When you add two to three weeks of transit time, that negatively affects them.”

Effect of recent US disruptions

Greenfield also reported fallout from two recent issues on the US side: the 11-week closure of the Port of Baltimore due to the Dali casualty, and a “vendor server issue” that closed the terminal gates for two days in Charleston in late May.

That IT issue, together with ongoing infrastructure work, led to a ship queue off Charleston that is still there (13 containerships were in the queue as of Friday).

“The incident in Baltimore shifted a lot of cargo to Norfolk and Charleston” — two of Greenfield’s main export gateways — “and affected the normal flow of containers”, said Aznarez.

“The Port of Baltimore situation was huge for us, because it congested the ports we shipped from,” added Thomson. “When the computer system went down in Charleston, that was another huge problem. There are still ships out there waiting.”

Fewer ocean carriers to choose from

Beyond logistics disruptions, Greenfield faces another issue that has been building for years: an increasingly small number of ocean carriers to choose from.

“We try to be very diverse in our carrier mix, but unfortunately, over the last several years, the carrier mix has been greatly reduced,” said Thomson.

“When I started in this business, I was working with 20 different shipping lines. Some were small, some were big. Now, we basically have six or seven lines to choose from, and that doesn’t give us a lot of options.

“And as the shipping lines have gotten bigger and bigger, it has become more complicated to deal with them. Because as the shipping lines have grown, they’ve had to hire a lot of people to push paper around and to make everything go, and they now have so many people working there that don’t know what they’re doing. These people aren’t really experienced, whereas a long time ago, it was a lot different.”