But with eight days of inactivity, container were backed up and stacked up at the port. We already told you that shipping companies were informing their customers of delays they would be experiencing because of the strike, and the BCCI warned that the cost of consumer goods would increase as well.
But according to customs broker, Delroy Fairweather, things aren't as dire as they may have seemed. He explained that there isn't as much of a backlog as was expected since some ships sailed south to the Big Creek Port. He also noted that consumers should not really see an increase in the cost of goods and, don't worry, shelves won't be empty.
Delroy Fairweather - VP, Customs Brokers Association of Belize
"The couple days delays that we had, remember vessels were diverting down to the Port of Big Creek which kind of picked up the slack, so we had maybe a couple days where we had to worked out the logistics and I could tell you that yes, containers are being trucked at present back to Belize City. So, to say that the country would have ran out of supplies, it could have been maybe something even more dramatic than this 8 days or so. What this actually did was created some delays which I would refer to it as very minimal delays, because now one week later the vessels which came into port that was scheduled to be here this week, so there is not really much it would say that it would have created a situation where the shelves would have been peeled. There are costs to move the containers from what we have worked out. If you would multiply or divide it into the total cost of what's inside those containers, it really and truly shouldn't be anything that significant, because the cost to move the containers were like probably around a thousand Belize dollars to move a container from Big Creek Port to Belize City. Let's say the value of containers its around twenty thousand Belize dollars, it wouldn't make any significant difference in terms of raising the price or anything. If we are moving into the price gouging aspect, if people start seeing maybe a notation in the cost and they are attributing it because goods were coming through Big Creek, I would say no, it would be more on the freight end, because of course we still are dealing with the price of containers at 300%-400% the freight cost at this moment. So the prices should be within the same range, it shouldn't be any difference of such."
On Monday, we'll check back to see how the offloading is going.
