Luanda ‘chaos’ threatens perishable cargo

Luanda – A crisis in cold chain maintenance in Angola may have major consequences for the country’s economy and is prompting shipping lines to question whether it is worthwhile to continue to move perishables to the nation’s ports. “It is absolute chaos up there. The shipping lines are tearing their hair out,” Dean Bouch, field manager for Africa and Israel of Carrier Transicold, told FTW. The problem in a nutshell is that a company that had been working with Carrier Transicold to maintain cold storage units suddenly disappeared. Carrier Transicold provides 70% of reefers used by the world’s shipping lines. “We work with shipping lines and not in Angola directly. But we wish to provide after sales service to our customers. We’ve been working with the lines ever since they started pushing for business in Angola after the war. We helped set up a company in Angola to do reefer maintenance, and they were successful. They had all the shipping lines as their customers,” said Bouch. But then one day the people in charge decided to go away and not come back. “There is such a skills shortage in Angola that they decided to close down a successful business just like that to start another business,” Bouch said. The result: perishable transport by sea, rail and road in Angola is in jeopardy. “The situation at the port of Luanda is bad enough. There are long queues because of customs, unreliable power supply and the congestion at the docks. The ships are waiting at port to offload, and when something goes wrong with one of their reefers there is only untrained staff available to fix it. And if they can find someone who knows the job there is no company to provide the parts,” Bouch said. Bouch said his firm was still committed to customer after sales service in Angola. Carrier Transicold is constantly in contact with shipping lines and potential service providers, but the regional service support woes are far from solved, he said.