On the recordJune 13, 2022
I stand in support of S. 3580 to defend the right of American business owners and farmers to receive fair pricing for the exportation of their valuable products across the world. Since the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a halt, the international exchange of goods has struggled to recover. Many Americans have felt the impact of the supply chain disruption in their homes and pockets. Products manufactured in factories overseas take too long to arrive at our ports. When they do arrive, they spend days docked on shore before distribution to American warehouses. However, the true crime in this broken system has been the theft of economic opportunity to American exporters. In the months of October and November 2021, when the global supply chain was at its most unstable, shipping carriers had the gall to arrive on U.S. soil, deposit foreign products and then reject the exports of American farmers and business owners. In these two months, ocean carriers turned away more than 175,000 containers from ports in California, New Jersey, and New York. According to some reports, nearly 40 percent of scheduled pickups of U.S. agricultural exports were cancelled or simply not completed. Three out of four shipping containers left American ports empty. That's a loss of over $630 million for American businesses. When shipping containers were available for export, price gouging ate into already small profit margins of our hard-working farmers.…
