Will Belize Experience Shipping Delays Like the US?

With all the shipping problems in the US news recently, News Five wanted to find out if Belizeans can expect problems with our own supply chains, especially for the upcoming holiday shopping. It is an important question because in 2020, Belize imported over one point five billion dollars in goods. Just about half of these goods came from the United States of America. There is a possibility that the disruption in the global supply chain, caused by a record backlog of cargo ships in the U.S could have an effect on Belize. But, the local market is not raising any alarms just yet. So far, the traditional routes used to ship items into Belize are not experiencing any problems. According to CEO at the Port of Belize Andy Lane, the disruption is largely on the West Coast of the U.S. Lane told us that Belize is connected to the world mainly through Kingston, Jamaica, and Kingston seems to be doing well. Additionally, Lane says, the Port of Belize’s volume remains down by twelve to fourteen percent of the twenty nineteen volumes, which means the Port has the capacity to absorb any surge at this time.

Andy Lane

Andy Lane, CEO, Port of Belize Limited

“The backlog that catches everybody’s attention is that of California, and it has been like that for nine months and it will be like that for nine more months. There has been some spread of congestion onto the East Coast, Savannah and New York suffering a little bit. And then, you have some Ports in Europe and occasionally Ports in Asia are also getting slowed from time to time. But, Kingston which is basically Belize’s gateway to the world, that is largely unaffected. They seem to have ample capacity and they seem to be working at a reasonably efficient level right now. So this is not likely to spread wide scale and impact Belize dramatically. By my calculations I think we have fifty five to sixty TEU of yard capacity, or we have yard capacity that will support fifty five to sixty thousand TEU. Last year we did thirty six thousand TEU and this year we are headed somewhere around thirty nine thousand TEU. So we have the yard capacity. Our constraints tend to be the fact that our little sixty seven meter berth and we only have space for one ship at a time. That is sufficient to deal with the present level of demands. Where it gets a bit tricky is when we get ships bunching and arriving at the same time. Then we will see delays of some ships which has to wait for earlier arriving ships to get worked and clear the port.”