(Zero Hedge)—Late last week, the CEO of Flexport – one of largest US supply-chain logistics operators – warned that “the biggest wild card in the presidential election that nobody’s talking about? The looming port strike that could shut down all East and Gulf Coast ports just 36 days before the election.”
The biggest wild card in the presidential election that nobody’s talking about? The looming port strike that could shut down all East and Gulf Coast ports just 36 days before the election. 🧵
— Ryan Petersen (@typesfast) September 18, 2024
With just over a week to go until D-Day, authorities are gearing up as a threatened strike by dockworkers at ports along the East Coast and Gulf Coast draws closer.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is “coordinating with partners across the supply chain to prepare for any impacts” from a possible work stoppage by workers represented by the International Longshoremen’s Association as they negotiate with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), a Port Authority spokesperson told CBS MoneyWatch on Friday.
“We urge both sides to find common ground and keep the cargo flowing for the good of the national economy,” added the spokesperson, noting that $240 billion in goods move through the two ports each year and that such trade supports more than 600,000 local jobs.
According to the union, a strike would affect ports from Maine to Texas, and cripple supply-chains worse than the immediate aftermath of the covid shutdown. A stoppage – the first since 1977 – could involve up to 45,000 workers at ports that account for roughly 60% of U.S. shipping traffic, leading to a major disruption of shipments, Oxford Economics said in a report.
“Even a two-week strike could disrupt supply chains until 2025,” Grace Zwemmer, associate U.S. economist with Oxford, said in the report.
As Rabobank’s Michael Every adds, “US businesses could miss the key Black Friday/Cyber Monday peak sales period. Port trade is around $2.12trn, and 72% would grind to a halt, a one-day strike reportedly taking six days to recover from, a one-week strike in October creating bottlenecks until mid-November, not factoring in Red Sea disruptions caused by the not-terrorist Houthis.”
If goods are then forced to shift to the US West Coast ports, Rabobank speculates that Asia-US freight rates could leap to $20,000, far above the peak seen in the last supply-chain crisis. That would mean firms with low margins might opt not to import at all, creating empty shelves.
The ILA has threatened to strike if a new labor agreement with East Coast port terminal and shipping companies represented by the USMX is not reached by the time the current contract expires on October 1. Although the sides continue to negotiate, the odds of a rare strike that threatens to shut down some of the nation’s busiest ports are rising.
“There will be a shutdown, assuming that there’s is no intervention, at midnight on Monday the 30th,” Bethann Rooney, director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the nation’s second-busiest port, told a briefing earlier in the week.
Should that occur, all activity loading and unloading cargo containers and automobiles would come to a standstill, while cruise ships would continue to operate, Rooney said.
The Port Authority isn’t involved in the bargaining between the ILA and USMX, bur rather leases space at the ports to shipping companies. Terminal operators and ocean carriers are “working to bring in as many ships as possible” ahead of a potential walkout, said Rooney.
Those steps include “working with truckers and the rail carriers to get as much cargo out as humanly possible, as quickly as possible,” the port director said.
The two ports are currently unloading about 20 large container ships a week, and they expect 150,000 containers to be unloaded ahead of the strike deadline, Rooney said.
“At the same time, ocean carriers are beginning to put essentially embargoes on export cargo “so that it doesn’t come into East and Gulf coast ports and then wind up sitting there,” she said.
Container ships carrying imports bound for Newark and Elizabeth in New Jersey and Staten Island in New York City will end up moored at specified spots in New York Harbor or off the coast during the strike, or remain at sea until they can come in. The Coast Guard and U.S. customs and Border Protection would oversee arriving ships at the port facilities once a strike was over.
The ILA union walked away from the bargaining table in June, declaring that a type of automation introduced at the Port of Mobile in Alabama was in violation of the current contract.
Based in North Bergen, New Jersey, the ILA represents 85,000 workers across the East and Gulf Coasts. The union is demanding sizable wage increases for its members as well as protection from “job-killing” automation.
The USMX has said it has not been able to schedule new bargaining sessions with the union.
“It is disappointing that we have reached this point where the ILA is unwilling to reopen dialogue unless all of its demands are met,” USMX said Tuesday in an update. “The only way to resolve this impasse is to resume negotiations, which we are willing to do at any time.”
While the Taft-Hartley Act gives the president the power to impose an 80-day cooling off period to delay a strike, Biden has said he doesn’t intend to use it here given the impact doing so could have on union votes; although with the Teamsters refusing to endorse Kamala despite the union’s traditional Democrat support (as the majority of its members polled back Trump) that may be a moot point.
On the other hand, Every warns that the kind of strike described above would likely cripple Harris’ chances come 5 November.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
