Mung beans, sticky rice and banana leaves. Confetti and little red envelopes for gift money.
Essential items for the start of Chinese New Year celebrations on Thursday were in short supply across the United States, an example of the widening and sometimes unexpected fallout from the gridlock at seaports on the West Coast.
The impasse, caused by a protracted labor dispute between the longshoremen’s union and shipowners, has brought crippling delays to sea freight in and out of the country and is wreaking havoc for retailers, food companies, farmers and manufacturers. For weeks, McDonald’s scrambled to address a global shortage of French fries, flying 1,000 tons of frozen fries to Japan to bypass the logjam.
Now, as communities across the country welcome the Lunar New Year — a holiday period of shopping and festivities akin to Thanksgiving or Christmas — hundreds of containers laden with trinkets and food are languishing on freighters moored off California. The vast Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex, together with ports in Oakland, Calif.; Tacoma, Wash.; and Seattle, together handle half of the container traffic entering the United States.
“There’s not enough sticky rice to make the dumplings. We don’t have holiday cookies or mung bean cakes. We’re running out of soy sauce,” said Jacklyn Sher, manager of H. C. Foods, a food importer in southeast Los Angeles, who said she was seeing worsening sea freight delays.
H. C. Foods brings in 50 to 100 10-foot containers a month, she said. But over the last two weeks, the company received just one container, a shipment that was due six weeks ago. Almost 200 containers of goodies including rice, beans, soy sauce, coconut milk and banana, bamboo and lotus leaves are stranded off various West Coast ports.
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“What a lot of the carriers have been doing on this side is using smaller ships that can access the Panama Canal in order to get to the East Coast,” he said. But there is a catch. The freight rates for these shipments have gone up as much as 50 percent.
In Los Angeles, Ms. Sher of H. C. Foods also said that extra costs were adding up, including rent for warehouses that sat empty for weeks because of unexpected shipment delays, payments to trucking companies to wait on standby and surcharge fees to the port. Her inventory costs have doubled over the last six months, she said.
The worst part, she said, was that she had no idea which shipments would arrive when. The single container that came through last week, she said, contained a large consignment of fish sauce, but not much else.
“It’s like a lotto. We just don’t know what’s going to get through,” she said. “But we are set for fish sauce.”
Erik Eckholm contributed reporting.
