Seafood shippers face increasing difficulty in moving their cargo around the world, particularly by sea.

As conference delegates at both Lloyd’s List Events’ Reefer Logistics Conference in Antwerp and Navigate’s Cool Chain Logistics conference in London heard recently, global reefer capacity is not meeting demand – and the situation is going to get worse, not better. Both reefer containers and breakbulk reefer ships are in short supply, but the trade in all temperature controlled goods, particularly seafood, continues to grow.

‘Between 1997 and 2007, volumes of temperature controlled foodstuffs moving around the world increased by 51%,’ says Mike Garratt, managing director of MDS Transmodal, who spoke in Antwerp.