There will be no more piles of rotten fruit after the strike ends, as cargo ships are now taking their fruit loads elsewhere in Europe.
Fruit trucks will have to wait for the strike to end at the Vuosaari harbour, as the strike by the Transport Workers’ Federation of the Automotive and Transport Industry (AKT) prohibits, for example, the unloading of banana containers.
– The containers are temperature-controlled and have the necessary cooling or heating systems on, even in ports, so I believe the fruit will be preserved during the strike,” says Kallio.
He also points out that banana peels, for example, spend several weeks at sea anyway. The shutdown is therefore unlikely to affect the shelf life of these fruits in freight containers.
The stevedore strike began on February 15, and it has been announced that it will continue indefinitely. During that time, ships are not loaded or unloaded in the ports, except for activities that are necessary for security of supply.
On average, 7,000-8,000 cargo containers are imported and exported in the Port of Helsinki during one week. About 90 percent of Finland’s foreign trade comes via sea transport.
A shortage of hundreds of thousands of bananas
If the stevedores’ strike lasted, for example, a week, about 100 banana containers would not pass through the port of Vuosaari.
Kallio says that currently cargo ships practically avoid Finland. The operators know that the goods don’t move here, and instead of Finland, they now transport their containers to other parts of Europe.
According to Kallio, the average weight of one container that arrives at Vuosaari port, whatever it contains, is around 15,000 kilos.
Kallio cannot estimate the weight of one container containing a banana, but states that a banana is a rather bulky item.
– Yes, it is talking about hundreds of thousands of individual bananas, if you start counting them, Kallio estimates.
If one load of bananas weighed, for example, 15 tons, a week’s banana cargo would weigh 1.5 million kilograms. The number only applies to the amount of bananas arriving in Helsinki.
However, it is likely that the stores will not run out of bananas in the very first days of the strike. They are often brought to Finland raw and the aim is to ripen them before selling.
AKT’s strike affects approximately 2,000 workers in the cramming industry. The Port of Helsinki is not a party to the strike.