Coronavirus and the end of the global supply chain
In depth: COVID-19 has shown how fragile cost-driven, just-in-time processes really are.
When the first container ship arriving from China at the port of Vancouver was cancelled in January this year, it didn’t seem particularly significant.
By mid-March, when China’s struggle with COVID-19, aka coronavirus, had become so all-consuming that 30 more journeys had been cancelled, Vancouver’s port officials were facing a crisis of historic magnitude.
That consumer goods weren’t being unloaded from China as per the schedule was less of a concern than the fact that Canada, which usually filled those containers with lentils and peas, had two months’ worth of crops stuck in port (historically, roughly a third of Canada’s crops have been exported in containers).
