Port of Oakland Executive Director Danny Wan says the port has embarked on a plan to play to its strength as one of the leading agriculture export facilities in the world to soften the impact of COVID challenges of the past three years.
In an exclusive interview with Transport Topics, Wan says the COVID-19 pandemic caused a number of shippers to begin skipping their regular stops at Oakland because it was more profitable to unload Oakland’s cargo at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and have it trucked 370 miles north, while those ships headed back to Asia to get more cargo as rates soared in 2020, 2021 and 2022.