The president of the Almond Alliance of California, Aubrey Bettencourt, recently criticized the current trade imbalance, which is causing shipping carriers to refuse exports for American goods.
“Ocean carriers are paid a premium by countries such as China to ship empty containers back to their home country to export more of their goods to the U.S. and all over the world, while American-grown goods rot on our docks,” Bettencourt said in a press release.
The concerns stem from the $2.1 billion loss endured by the California agriculture industry during a five-month period in 2021, resulting from carriers’ decision to prioritize moving empty containers over those filled with agricultural goods.
According to data from the Census Bureau and the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, California and New York and New Jersey, shipping carriers turned back an estimated 177.938 containers between October and November 2021. This accounts for a total export loss of $632 million.
The sum of exports has also decreased by 258 million pounds, counting only 993 million pounds of almonds so far this year, as opposed to the 1.25 billion pounds exported between Aug. 1, 2020 and Feb. 1, 2021.
"Compared to the same months in the previous time periods, there is a clear increase in the ratio of empty export containers to total exports,” John Martin, manager of the economic and transportation consulting firm Martin Associate, said in a release.
The sitting and unused supply of almonds have caused almond prices to drop by $1 per pound; at current inventory of 2 billion pounds, that is a loss of $2 billion. The revenue loss trickles down to lost cash flow to farmers, lost employee wages, lost business to ancillary companies and lost tax revenue to the community.
“This underscores our continued dependency on China," Redwood Logistics CEO Mark Yeager, who supported the findings of an CNBC analysis, said. "Three in four containers from the U.S. to Asia are going back empty. The reason for this is the Chinese are being so aggressive about trying to get empty containers back ... that it’s hard to get a container for U.S. exporters.”
Castigating the current trade imbalance, which has shipping carriers refusing to export American goods, Bettencourt goes on to say that “as a result of this trade imbalance, it's not just American products that are rotting. America's position in the world is deteriorating as fast as the fruits and vegetables left at our ports. America's reputation as a reliable trade partner is also becoming spoiled.”