How Our Dependence on Global Shipping Will Come Back to Bite Us
If the general public understood how vulnerable our reliance on global shipping made us, they’d all become preppers overnight. Trucks, planes, and cargo ships are responsible for just about everything modern life depends upon. This reliance on global goods and long-distance shipping puts us all at risk.
Our Dependence Upon Global Shipping
Modern shipping keeps us clothed and fed. It brings us necessary medicines, fuel to the pumps, and delivers chemicals necessary to municipal water treatment plants. It is truly amazing how seamless it all appears to the average consumer, especially considering shipping’s global scale.
That is until there is a problem. Problems can be anything from a trucker’s strike to a plane crashing to a cyber attack shutting down the largest global shipping company.
Global shipping is a necessary evil in a world where we rely on global goods. When companies take their manufacturing operations overseas, the first thing we think of is lost jobs. But, we also put access to those goods at risk. Some of these risks include:
- Relations with China breaking down over North Korea.
- Hackers taking down software (navigation, customer orders, inventory tracking, systems diagnostics, etc) on ships, planes, trucks, and at ports and command centers.
- An EMP causing all electronic systems to cease working.
- Employees of shipping companies across an industry going on an extended strike.
- Deteriorating domestic infrastructure interfering with the delivery of goods.
- War/terrorism anywhere in the world causing delays and lost shipments of imports/exports.
Just a 24-Hour Delay Causes Shortages
A perfect example of this is shipping fresh food to Alaska all year long. Alaskan grocery stores do what they can to stock Alaska-grown items on their shelves, but due to the climate, Alaskans rely on imported produce and goods. The Anchorage Daily News reported on the impact of a single ship being delayed by just 24 hours for a repair.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
