WESTERN PRODUCER — Did you notice that the shipping container crisis is over?
If you’re tightly connected to the lentils, peas and other often-containerized crops business, you might have. Most other people have no clue that things are mostly back to normal.
That’s how we operate: jump from one problem to the next once the main problem before us has resolved. It’s a healthy way to function because it keeps us focused on things that need work.
But we can’t forget about what we suffered through. We learned some things and can’t afford to fall back into ignorant innocence. We can’t stop working on this, just because this particular crisis is done.
Farmers and the pulse and special crops industry are extremely vulnerable to structural problems in the global shipping container industry. It has become the dominant form of world trade in many goods and commodities. It’s here to stay.
But it’s run by an oligarchy of companies following rules that don’t focus on treating shippers fairly, equally, or as anything other than fare-payers.
When containers get to Canada, they face clogged ports and infrastructure creaking under competing and growing demands.
Vancouver is both a logistical miracle and nightmare. It’s a miracle that Canada can funnel tens of millions of tonnes of crops and tens of millions tonnes of other commodities, as well as vast amounts of manufactured goods through a port that has a giant city built all around it, which lies at the foot of mountains, and which is connected to the national economy through thin and precarious rail lines running across thousands of kilometres of often harsh terrain and weather.
It’s a nightmare because the choke points in the system can strangle its vital operations. Other than the precarious rail lines, there are urban issues, Indigenous issues, labour issues and political issues ever-threatening to disrupt the delicate system upon which farmers and the national economy rely.
Remember that problem with grain-loading not being allowed during the rain — in rainy Vancouver? That hasn’t gone away. It’s being worked on by industry and government officials in Ottawa, but most of us aren’t talking about that now. We’ve moved on to other problems.
That’s the sort of thing we need people to keep working on, so that the next time a crisis arises the situation is improved.
During the container shipping crisis, Pulse Canada did a fantastic job representing farmers and the special crops industry with Ottawa and the public. It hammered away at the issues inside and outside government and industry circles, ensuring the situation was recognized. That’s work is continuing and needs to continue, despite container shipping prices falling back to the 2019 ballpark and becoming more available. The problems that arose from 2020 to the end of 2022 could easily recur.
Farmers survived over these past three years. That’s great. But farmers need their representatives to keep working on these issues.
It’s great to move on from this crisis and focus on the next ones, but until we’ve resolved the problems that allowed it to develop in the first place, we’re still just one set of circumstances away from going through it again.
