Carriers prioritizing profit when deploying freighter capacity have caused "headaches" for Kenyan flower shippers forced to dump a significant portion of their produce.
At last week's World Cargo Summit in Bruges, the MD of Florius International, Willum Van den Hoogen, shocked delegates by revealing that some 20% of his flower shipments from Kenya had been "dumped on the compost heap" in November, "because there simply was no cargo capacity out of Kenya into the Netherlands."
Eline van den Berg, supply chain specialist at Royal FloraHolland, explained that Ethiopia benefited from regular Ethiopian Airlines flights to Liège and Brussels – with rates and capacity largely stable post-Covid – she told The Loadstar it was "a different situation" in Kenya.
"Capacity still hasn't recovered to pre-Covid levels, and actually, what we've seen in the last year because of e-commerce, several airlines took some capacity from Kenya and the rates in general have increased a lot.
Read more at The Load Star
