According to Charles Gantz, managing director at Anlin Shipping, they usually carry apples and pears in containers on-deck. But with the current disruptions, exporters are willing to carry apples below-deck, and with great success.
Anlin Shipping doesn’t usually budget for vessels during April, but this year three of their vessels have already taken 15,000 pallets to Rotterdam and St Petersburg loaded with South African grapefruit, lemons, and soft citrus fruits.
Highly unusual, too, was the freight on the Crown Garnet, loaded mid-April, with just under 2,000 tonnes of apples for the UK carried below-deck.
Gantz says there’s definitely a shift underway from containers to conventional shipping, due to a combination of factors: container availability, the congestion at harbours, the concomitant backlog that has to be worked away. The shift has prompted Mitchell Brooke, logistics manager at the Citrus Growers’ Association to remark that the Wild Peony, a Reefer Alliance vessel that departed South Africa last week, was probably the first ship in a long time to leave with a full load of citrus for the EU and Russia. “There’s a whole lot of on-deck container freight that has come over to conventional, definitely more than if this were a normal season.”
Citrus breakbulk cost lower per carton
The drop in the oil price makes a citrus breakbulk shipment more competitive per carton than container shipping, he adds, despite the fact that breakbulk vessels take fewer cartons per pallet, because of deck height restrictions. “Even if it weren’t for the coronavirus, the fact that we’re more competitive, especially on our price until the end of July, works in our favour.”
The decision to make the move back from containers to breakbulk has a psychological component, he says, because when a conventional vessel arrives with 4,000 pallets it seems like a huge volume, compared to the scattering of containers that arrive on various vessels, but in reality when pallets are calculated as containers, the volumes are completely in line.
They carry about 4,500 pallets below-deck and 1,500 pallets in containers (which they own) above-deck, around 6,000 pallets per shipment, employing standard height pallets.
As for the actual extent of container shortages, he says reports vary. Some big exporters who usually require around a hundred containers a week have only been able to receive a third of that, while others report no problems getting hold of what they need, but then they might be experiencing problems with other disruptions.
“These are very tough times. Farms have their challenges to keep operations going, exporters are under a lot of pressure to service their markets and keep programmes going.”
