An eight-day-old strike by Brazilian truck drivers is beginning to affect global commodity markets as soybean traders delay shipments and the nation’s vast sugar industry shuts down more of its processing plants.
While many blockades have been lifted and the government has signed decrees aimed at getting the truckers back to work, the protests continued on Monday, and many of Brazil’s businesses and public schools remained shut.
Chinese food giant COFCO International Ltd (中糧國際) temporarily suspended soybean shipments from Santos, Brazil’s largest port, because of a shortage of cargoes for export, people with direct knowledge of the matter said.
Photo: AFP
The company does not have enough of the oilseed to fill a vessel expected to dock on Monday, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the information has not been published.
A COFCO spokesman declined to comment on the disruption.
Brazil is the world’s largest soybean exporter and its supplies have assumed an even greater importance in recent weeks after China, the biggest buyer, threatened to impose tariffs on supplies from the US, the second-largest shipper.
Delays to Brazilian exports may encourage Chinese importers to take more US beans.
Other soy exporters at Santos used inventories over the weekend to keep shipments moving, but the amount now remaining is very low, the people said.
Archer-Daniels-Midland Co, another major processor of soybeans, on Friday last week said it had halted or slowed some operations after running out of storage space.
As a result of sluggish shipments, the number of vessels waiting to dock in Santos increased to 18 on Friday from 10 on Monday last week, when the strike began, according to data from shipping agency Williams.
The flow of trucks to the port was still halted on Monday and the delivery of goods to export terminals has been reduced as a result, the port authority said.
In Paranagua Port, the second-largest in Brazil for grain shipments, five vessels that were supposed to carry about 300,000 tonnes of soy meal have not been able to sail in the past seven days because there is not enough of the commodity to load them, a press official from the port authority said.
Another three vessels slated to transport pulp and sugar also failed to depart from the port because of a shortage of supplies. Soybean shipments from Paranagua have not been affected so far as exporters have used inventories stored at the port’s terminals.
Coffee shipments are halted at most Brazilian port terminals, Nelson Carvalhaes, president of exporters group CeCafe, told reporters.
Plants that supply soybean oil, biodiesel and orange juice plants have also had their operations suspended, as their warehouses are full.
Brazil is home to the world’s largest sugar industry and most of its mills have halted sugarcane harvesting amid a lack of fuel. All plants and cane suppliers in Sao Paulo state were to suspend operations until yesterday amid a shortage of diesel, industry group UNICA said.
Biosev SA, the Louis Dreyfus Co unit that is Brazil’s second-biggest sugar producer, said it suspended operations at two cane mills and others will run out of fuel in the next two days.
Cane processing in the center-south region might be cut by 10.9 million tonnes in the second half of this month because of the strike, INTL FCStone Inc said on Monday in a report.
JBS, the world’s largest meat company, has halted all domestic slaughtering of cattle, hogs and chicken because it cannot get its products to customers nor receive deliveries of feed, a person familiar with the matter said.
“Beef production levels in Brazil are now close to zero,” Hyberville Neto, an analyst at Scot consultancy, said in a telephone interview. “The cattle market has been completely frozen since Thursday.”
Meat exporters’ group ABPA said that supplies of animal feed to chicken producers would gradually return to normal in the next few days.
Its members have requested police protection for a planned convoy to transport meat products to Paranagua for export.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day