Author: News Polite

Ukraine has defeated Russia in the first phase of their war, and a second phase has begun.

Having failed to topple Ukraine’s government, Russia has narrowed its ambitions and is concentrating on the eastern part of Ukraine known as the Donbas region. Vladimir Putin’s new goal appears to be severing Donbas from the rest of Ukraine and creating puppet republics there.

This new phase brings some big advantages that Russia did not have when it was attempting to conquer all of Ukraine. But Putin and his military also face some of the same challenges — including low morale — as before. The outcome remains highly uncertain.

(Here’s a Times overview of the coming battle.)

Today’s newsletter explains the battle for Donbas, with help from Times reporters around the world. We will start by looking at Russia’s new advantages and then consider Ukraine’s continuing advantages.

Russia’s edge …

When I was talking with Eric Schmitt — a Times senior writer who has been covering military issues for most of the past three decades — he offered a useful analogy for thinking about the war’s new phase.

Until now, much of the fighting has occurred in parts of Ukraine that roughly resemble an American suburb, Eric explained. There are houses, office buildings and side streets where Ukrainian forces can hide and then attack Russian soldiers. This physical geography leaves civilians vulnerable — but benefits troops that are using guerrilla warfare to defend territory against an advancing army.

Much of the Donbas region is different. Its geography more closely resembles the plains of Kansas than a New York City suburb. “It’s much more wide open,” Eric said. “There are fewer places for Ukrainians to pop out from.”

Today, there are actual trench lines in Donbas, stretching over hundreds of miles and sometimes separating areas controlled by Ukraine from those controlled by Russia. This terrain will allow Russia to use its many tanks, large missile systems and other heavy weapons systems; Ukraine’s military has far fewer of these. The shoulder-fired missiles that Ukraine has been receiving from the West, and using to great effect over the past two months, will probably be less helpful in Donbas.

The newly focused battlefield has other tactical advantages for Russia, too:

• It can concentrate its troops in Donbas, and a direct conflict between the countries’ armies seems to favor Russia. When the war began, it had more than twice as many troops as Ukraine, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

• The Donbas region borders Russia, allowing Putin’s generals to build shorter and less exposed supply lines than they needed elsewhere in Ukraine.

• Russia is familiar with the territory. It began fighting sporadic battles in Donbas in 2014 and has since been supporting separatist rebels there. The new head of the war effort, General Aleksandr Dvornikov, has overseen Russian operations in Donbas since 2016, after commanding Russian troops in Syria.

In addition to military tactics, public opinion in Donbas also appears to be more favorable to Russia than it is elsewhere in Ukraine. Shortly before the war, about 30 percent of the region’s residents wanted it to become part of Russia, while about another 10 percent favored independence, according to a poll by academic researchers.

In areas currently controlled by Russian-backed separatists — which make up more than one-third of Donbas — a slight majority favored leaving Ukraine. That’s very different from the situation in the rest of the country, where Ukrainian patriotism is widely shared.

… and Ukraine’s edge

Together, Russia’s advantages offer reason to believe that it may fare better in the next phase of the war than during its humiliating defeat and withdrawal in the initial phase.

But before you assume that’s inevitable, it is worth remembering something: On paper, Russia also seemed likely to win the first phase of the war. Military planners in Moscow expected that they would be able to topple Ukraine’s government within days or weeks. Many experts in the U.S. and Western Europe — and many westerners in Ukraine when the war began — assumed the same.

It didn’t happen. Russia’s military proved far less effective than most observers expected.

Its air force was not able to dominate the skies over Ukraine. Its military units rarely communicated over encrypted lines, allowing Ukraine to intercept its messages. Many Russian troops did not expect to invade Ukraine and were not happy their superiors ordered them to do so.

“The vehicles are still poorly maintained, troop morale will remain low,” Michael Repass, an American major general who has worked with Ukraine for years, told The Times.

Even if winning control of Donbas is an easier task than overwhelming all of Ukraine, it is not easy. Ukraine has highly motivated troops, more of whom can now shift to Donbas. And the West is racing to supply Ukraine with tanks and heavy, longer-range artillery, as well as the shoulder-fired missiles that proved so effective around Kyiv. “How this logistical race goes could well shape the outcome of the war,” this Times story explains.

Public opinion in Donbas may also be shifting away from Russia, because of the invasion. “If a bomb falls on your house, latent sympathies change into hard antipathies,” Michael Schwirtz, a Times reporter in Ukraine, said. At the start of the war, he was reporting from Kharkiv, an eastern Ukrainian city where — as in parts of Donbas — the primary language is Russian. Yet the invasion nonetheless made many Kharkiv residents “viciously, viciously angry,” Michael said.

The Institute for the Study of War, a military research group in Washington, offered this summary:

Russian forces may be able to gain ground through the heavy concentration of artillery and numbers. However, Russian operations are unlikely to be dramatically more successful than previous major offensives around Kyiv. The Russian military is unlikely to have addressed the root causes — poor coordination, the inability to conduct cross-country operations, and low morale — that impeded prior offensives.

The bottom line: A quick victory — by either side — seems unlikely. Then again, war is often very difficult to predict.

More on Ukraine

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SYDNEY, Australia — When the Solomon Islands’ prime minister stood before Parliament on Wednesday to announce that his government had signed a sweeping security agreement with China, he insisted that it would “not adversely impact or undermine the peace and harmony of our region.”

The prime minister, Manasseh Sogavare, did not explain why he delivered the news just a few days before a delegation of senior American diplomats was set to arrive in the country’s capital, and while neighboring Australia is in the midst of an election campaign. Nor did he say whether the signed version matched an earlier leaked draft that offered an opening for Chinese law enforcement, troops and warships — and perhaps even a Beijing-controlled military base in the strategically important Pacific.

What did seem certain was that Mr. Sogavare, despite his vague assurance, had shaken his own democracy and the stability of the region with this pact. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and his armed forces now have a foothold in an island chain that played a decisive role in World War II and could be used to block vital shipping lanes. And China could be a partner in squashing dissent for Mr. Sogavare, who has suggested that he wants to rewrite the Constitution and delay next year’s election in his deeply divided country.

“It’s a game changer,” said Anne-Marie Brady, a professor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, who has investigated Chinese influence in the region.

The deal — if the signed version, as expected, resembles the draft — reveals a stunning set of potential precedents for world leaders who are already losing sleep over the global contest between democracy and autocracy.

To start, it provides a broad mandate for China to potentially intervene when its foreign investments and diaspora are under threat, as it stretches its projection of military power.

Chinese and Solomons officials have both suggested that the security agreement is needed to ensure stability after several days of violent unrest in November aimed at both Chinese interests and the Sogavare government. In the draft, almost anything tied to China, from its citizens to small businesses to infrastructure to stadiums — like the one a Chinese contractor is building in the capital, Honiara — could be enough to spur a request for Chinese troops.

In a world where Chinese investment seems to be everywhere, many other nations could face similar pressure to allow in Beijing’s forces. More than 140 countries have signed on to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, in which China typically lend large sums of money to countries for roads, dams, railways, ports and sports facilities.

With the pact, China is essentially trying to establish a principle of using military force to protect its economic presence in places where it claims the government does not have the capacity, said Richard Herr, a law professor at the University of Tasmania who has advised several Pacific governments.

What the Solomons’ deal tells the world, at the very least, he added, “is that China believes that if its major projects are threatened, it wants a right to protect them.”

Charles Edel, the Australia chair and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, described the deal in more dire, and more expansive, terms.

“The lesson for the rest of the world is that China is looking to rebalance the global order in its favor,” he said. “And whether that means opening trade routes, establishing a military facility or signing a security agreement, Beijing will act to benefit its own interests, to the detriment of democracy and an open and free world.”

The Solomons aren’t the only place where the Chinese government has sought to couple security and economic arrangements — it has done so from Djibouti to Pakistan to Cambodia, where China has launched infrastructure projects that helped it gain access to strategic ports. But Mr. Edel said the agreement in the Solomons was “in some ways even more concerning.”

Think real estate: location, location, location. Because the nation of roughly 900 islands sits across shipping lanes connecting the United States to Asia, the Solomons (and its neighbors) have long been a strategic priority — as Japan showed in World War II, before the Americans dislodged its forces in the battle of Guadalcanal.

“The security deal between China and the Solomon Islands did not materialize out of thin air,” Mr. Edel said. “China has ramped up its presence and extended its influence across the Pacific over the past decade, and as it has done so, Beijing has been on the hunt for a military base in the region, which would allow it to project power outward and further influence the politics across the Indo-Pacific region.”

In Mr. Sogavare, the Chinese government has found a willing partner. And his commitment to such a secretive deal has shown how a single politician cozying up to Beijing in a small country can create geopolitical risks worldwide.

Mr. Sogavare is a savvy political survivor. He was appointed prime minister in 2019 for the fourth time, sparking protests in the capital, with the police using tear gas against angry crowds. Some of that discontent spilled into the city’s Chinatown, which has often been a hot spot for unrest and frustration but has become even more of a focus given Mr. Sogavare’s quick embrace of China.

Soon after taking office, he broke off diplomatic relations with Taiwan and opened them with Beijing. He (and Chinese officials) promised a flood of investment for the struggling, sprawling island nation of 687,000 people, but the flow so far has been more of a trickle.

Covid and other challenges have prevented any sort of rapid boom, and his decision to move in China’s direction is not popular at home. The protests in November were spurred by frustration from a province, Malaita, whose leaders tend to be more skeptical of China.

In a poll late last year, more than 90 percent of Solomon Islanders said they wanted their country to work closely with liberal democratic countries instead of China, and 79 percent said they did not want their country receiving financial aid from China.

Australia, which has often been the security assistant of choice for the region — sending a team in November to quell the unrest — is equally unhappy. When the draft of the agreement was leaked, Australian officials pressed the Sogavare government not to sign it.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison put the blame on China, saying the pact showed how many nations were vulnerable to Chinese encroachment.

“The sort of pressure and influence that has been seeking to be exerted in our region is very real,” he said.

American officials also tried to avoid scolding the Sogavare government. A State Department spokesman said the security deal followed a pattern in which the Chinese government offers “shadowy, vague deals with little regional consultation.”

Mr. Sogavare has shown little interest in listening, to Australia, the United States or other Pacific Island nations that have expressed concerns. In Parliament on Wednesday, after announcing that the security deal had been signed, he said: “I ask all our neighbors, friends and partners to respect the sovereign interests of Solomon Islands.”

His critics in government are now worried that challenging him with a no-confidence vote could lead to more protests and a pretense for requesting Chinese assistance. Just the threat of Chinese intervention is already undermining the country’s democracy, Mr. Sogavare’s opponents say.

“This agreement is not in the interests of Solomon Islands at all,” said Peter Kenilorea Jr., the deputy opposition leader in Parliament and chairman of its foreign relations committee. “It’s in the interests of Beijing and the interest of the current government. It’s to keep them in power.”

The events of Jan. 6, 2021, are casting a long shadow over the midterm elections. Voters in North Carolina are seeking to bar Representative Madison Cawthorn from running for re-election to his House seat, and those in Georgia are trying to do the same to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

These voters have filed complaints with state elections officials arguing that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies members of Congress who engage in insurrection from appearing on the congressional ballot. (Challenges to other elected officials have also begun involving other candidates.)

But these challenges face an intractable problem: Only the federal government — not the states — can disqualify insurrectionists from congressional ballots. States cannot unilaterally create procedures, unless authorized by federal statute, to keep accused insurrectionists off the congressional ballot.

If these members of Congress engaged in insurrection, then the U.S. House of Representatives may exclude them, or federal prosecutors may charge them with the federal crime of insurrection. But in light of an important 1869 judicial decision, the cases against Mr. Cawthorn and Ms. Greene — which are currently mired in both state and federal proceedings — cannot remove the candidates from the congressional ballot.

The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 in the wake of the Civil War. Section 3 disqualified many former Confederates from holding certain public offices if they had taken an oath to support the U.S. Constitution but subsequently, as Section 3 declares, “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Since 1868, the federal judiciary has had few occasions to interpret Section 3. As a result, the courts are largely in uncharted territory. Nevertheless, there is some important on-point precedent.

An 1869 case concerning Hugh W. Sheffey is instructive for the Jan. 6 litigation and how courts might see things today. Mr. Sheffey took an oath to support the Constitution but later served as a member of the Confederate Virginia legislature, thereby actively supporting the Confederacy.

After the war, he served as a state court judge. As Judge Sheffey, he presided over the trial and conviction of Caesar Griffin for shooting with an intent to kill. Later, Mr. Griffin challenged his conviction in federal court. He argued that Section 3 should have disqualified Mr. Sheffey from serving as judge. Griffin’s case, as it is known, was heard on appeal by the federal circuit court in Virginia. Salmon P. Chase, the chief justice of the United States and an appointee of President Abraham Lincoln, presided over the appeal. Chief Justice Chase ruled against Mr. Griffin, finding that Section 3 did not disqualify Judge Sheffey, despite the fact that he had taken an oath to support the U.S. Constitution and that it was “admitted,” as the case stated, that he later committed a Section 3 disqualifying offense.

Chief Justice Chase reasoned “that legislation by Congress is necessary to give effect to” Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — and that “only” Congress can enact that legislation. Chief Justice Chase added that the exclusion of disqualified office holders “can only be provided for by Congress.” Congress must create the procedure that would determine if a defendant violated Section 3. Section 5 of the 14th Amendment emphasizes this principle: Congress, it states, “shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

In short, Griffin’s case teaches that in legal terms, Section 3 is not self-executing — that is, Congress must establish, or at least authorize, the process that affords accused insurrectionists an opportunity to contest the allegations brought against them.

Mr. Cawthorn and Ms. Greene deny that they engaged in insurrection and oppose any assertion that they violated the law, which would include Section 3 disqualifying offenses. Moreover, in the Cawthorn and Greene cases, the plaintiffs have not pointed to any federal legislation authorizing the states to police Section 3 by disqualifying accused insurrectionists from the congressional ballot. Without federal authorization, state elections boards and even state courts could very well be powerless to make determinations about congressional candidates and Section 3.

There may be another way, based on an existing statute, to disqualify a candidate from congressional ballots: the Insurrection Act of 1862. This legislation, which predated the 14th Amendment, mirrors one of the disqualifying offenses established in Section 3.

The modern Insurrection Act is virtually unchanged from the statute Lincoln signed in 1862. If the Justice Department indicts and succeeds in convicting Mr. Cawthorn, Ms. Greene or others of insurrection under that act, then on that basis, state elections boards and state courts may remove these candidates from the congressional ballot.

But so far, the Justice Department has not charged any congressional candidates with inciting or engaging in an insurrection or with any other disqualifying offenses. Most of the Jan. 6 federal charges have been based on things like property crimes or for obstructing official proceedings or assaulting officers rather than insurrection.

If the Justice Department does not secure a conviction of a Section 3 disqualifying offense before the state ballot is printed (the primary in North Carolina is scheduled for May 17 and the one in Georgia for May 24), then, generally, state boards of election and even state courts will be powerless to remove otherwise eligible congressional candidates from the ballot.

Recently, some scholars and advocates have contested Chief Justice Chase’s opinion in Griffin’s case as precluding the state challenges against Mr. Cawthorn and Ms. Greene. In their view, even in the absence of a federal statute, state election officials who conclude that a person engaged in insurrection may proceed to remove that candidate from the congressional ballot. There is no Supreme Court precedent that squarely forecloses that position. Moreover, Chief Justice Chase’s decision was not rendered by the United States Supreme Court, and so it is not controlling precedent. On Monday, a federal court in Georgia allowed the state court disqualification proceeding to go forward against Representative Greene. The federal judge did so without citing or distinguishing Griffin’s case.

Still, we think the chief justice’s opinion is persuasive; we expect state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, will likely follow this historically entrenched position. Chief Justice Chase’s approach is the simplest path. If the courts find that Section 3 is not self-executing, there is no need for state election officials to decide far more politically charged questions about whether Mr. Cawthorn and Ms. Greene — and potentially, looking ahead to 2024, Donald Trump — engaged in insurrection.

Congress has not authorized the states to enforce Section 3 by striking congressional candidates from the ballot. Thus, state courts and elections boards lack jurisdiction to exclude alleged insurrectionists from the congressional ballot. In such circumstances, state governments must let the people decide who will represent them in Congress.

Josh Blackman is a law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. S.B. Tillman is an associate professor at the Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology. They recently wrote a law review article about the application of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to President Trump.

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During a normal spring, the sight of orchards bursting with clusters of almonds is a boon throughout California’s Central Valley. Here is money growing on trees.

Not this year.

As Scott Phippen looks out on his orchard on a recent afternoon, he feels a sense of foreboding tinged with rage. His warehouse is stuffed with the leftovers of last year’s harvest — 30 million pounds of almonds stored in wooden and plastic bins stacked to the rafters, and overflowing into his yard. Orders assembled for customers sit in giant white plastic bags and cardboard cartons arrayed across pallets, awaiting ships that can carry them across the water to Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

The almonds are here, the customers are over there, and the global shipping industry is failing to span the divide.

Every week, Mr. Phippen, 67, a compulsively organized overseer of his family business, Travaille & Phippen, peers hopefully at a calendar showing confirmed bookings on container vessels sailing to points worldwide from the port of Oakland, 65 miles to the west on San Francisco Bay. Every week, he absorbs all manner of disheartening news: No shipping containers available, no vessel arriving, no space on board.

“My warehouses are already bulging at the seams,” Mr. Phippen says. “It scares the crap out of me, because in five months I’m going to get a new crop in the door. There’s no timeout in farming.”

Beyond a logistical torment, the crisis assailing almond producers is inflicting deep financial consequences, from diminished revenues to higher costs for storage. The same can be said for a broad array of other American agricultural exporters — from wheat growers in North Dakota to soybean producers in Nebraska — as shipping crops to customers has become maddening to the point of futility.

Most of the almonds stuck in Mr. Phippen’s warehouses have already been purchased by buyers across the water, but he cannot collect payment until they make it onto a ship.

“Those almonds aren’t worth squat in the warehouse,” he says. “They are worth a lot of money in Dubai.”

The exasperation of agricultural exporters amounts to the latest chapter of the Great Supply Chain Disruption, the tumultuous reordering of international trade and transportation amid the worst pandemic in a century. At the center of the story is the shipping container — the steel box that revolutionized commerce, allowing unfathomable quantities of goods to be carried around the planet.

Shipping companies — which last year collectively secured profits reaching $190 billion — harvested especially enormous returns on their routes from Chinese ports to the West Coast of the United States.

Traditionally, carriers unload containers arriving from China at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and then ship empties up to Oakland, where they are reloaded with almonds and other agricultural crops.

But in recent months, the carriers have put growing numbers of empty containers back on ships immediately. The companies can make more money sending the valuable containers directly back to Asia, where they are refilled with goods destined for American consumers.

Almond growers like Mr. Phippen have been left with sharply limited options to deliver their wares to customers abroad. Throughout California, more than 1.1 billion pounds of almonds from last year’s harvest are sitting in warehouses, a volume roughly one-third larger than this time last year, according to the Almond Alliance of California, an industry trade group.

“Foreign carriers are being allowed to disrespect us, and we can’t do anything about it,” says Aubrey Bettencourt, the association’s president. “We have no recourse.”

As the Biden administration contends with public anger over inflation, the president has seized on the shipping industry as a central part of the explanation. President Biden used his State of the Union address to excoriate carriers for mistreatment of “American businesses and consumers,” while vowing a “crackdown.”

Daniel B. Maffei, chairman of the Federal Maritime Commission, which regulates the shipping industry, promises to hold the carriers to account.

“Government should stand on the side of those facing an unfair advantage when they have a legitimate grievance against big powerful companies,” says Mr. Maffei, who has served on the commission since 2016 and was named chairman last month by Mr. Biden. The commission is “actively looking to investigate cases where exporters are being pushed around by carriers or, worse, ignored by them,” he added.

Recently passed bills in the House and Senate would bolster the commission’s authority to investigate complaints and take action.

“The market is dysfunctional from the standpoint of American exporters,” says Representative John Garamendi, a California Democrat, who sponsored the legislation in the House.

But the shipping industry counters that it is being scapegoated for the broad turmoil unleashed by the pandemic amid booming demand for goods produced in Chinese factories, from exercise bikes to kitchenware. Despite floating traffic jams at major ports, a supposed shortage of truck drivers and a dearth of warehouse space, the carriers have managed to move record volumes of cargo.

“There’s a frustration that really complex problems are getting sound-bited to the point where policymakers aren’t dealing with the structural challenges,” says John Butler, president of the World Shipping Council, a trade association in Washington.

He blamed changes in supply and demand for rising shipping costs, while warning that federal intervention could worsen troubles.

“Do people really believe that having the federal government on the dock with a clipboard saying, ‘That box goes on the ship, that one doesn’t,’ is more efficient and fair than letting the market sort it out?” Mr. Butler says.

Crossing the Water

Most of the time, James Blocker would be cheering on an argument like the one the shipping industry is making — let the markets decide. But his predisposition against bureaucratic intervention has been tested by his predicament. As an exporter, his job is to move Mr. Phippen’s almonds across the ocean. Right now, booking passage on ships is bordering on impossible.

“I feel helpless,” he says.

Mr. Blocker’s company, Valley Pride, is among the largest exporters of almonds in California, the most bountiful agricultural economy in the United States.

Every year, California farmers produce more than three billion pounds of almonds, or about 80 percent of the world’s supply. Nearly all those nuts are harvested on more than 6,000 farms in the Central Valley — a flat, arid zone characterized by relentless sunshine, furnace-like summer heat and some of the most prodigious soils on earth.

Mr. Blocker grew up in the Valley, on the same land that his great-grandfather purchased after arriving nearly a century ago, in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl that ravaged his native Oklahoma. He spent his childhood roaming the rural fringes of what is today greater Fresno, one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country, and a community centered on the business of growing food.

Fresh from college at Fresno State, Mr. Blocker worked as a commodity trader for Cargill, the agribusiness conglomerate. In 2013, he started Valley Pride.

The business includes an orchard and a packing plant, but its heart is an enormous sales and distribution operation that buys almonds from growers throughout California and exports them around the world.

Last year, Valley Pride sold 140 million pounds of nuts while securing revenues reaching $350 million.

Though Valley Pride is generally compelled to pay its growers no later than a month after an outbound shipment arrives at a port, the company does not itself get paid until the almonds make it to their final destination.

The chaos roiling shipping has widened the time between those two events. That has forced the company to tap its credit line, expanding what it has borrowed to about $8 million from less than $2 million, Mr. Blocker says.

Tall and sinewy, Mr. Blocker, 41, is a study in the contrasts of modern agribusiness. He drives a pickup truck, has a thick beard and wears cowboy boots, while holding up his faded jeans with a giant silver rodeo-style belt buckle. He crouches in the dirt at his orchard, tending to a leak in the irrigation system. Yet he spends most of his days inside a glassed-in office in a compound in North Fresno, across the street from a state office building. Trophies from his hunting trips — deer skulls with antlers — are mounted over his desk, above photos of his wife and three children.

“I’m pretty redneck,” he says. “The big city, the glitz and glamour doesn’t really do much for me.”

Mr. Blocker’s partner, Sunny Toor, was born in the Indian state of Punjab, worked as a banker in Canada and travels the world finding new markets for California almonds. Valley Pride’s senior vice president for sales, Sorbon Sharifov, grew up in Tajikistan and speaks five languages — Persian, Russian, Arabic, Tajik and English — which is useful as the company pushes into Central Asia.

But lately, the shipping industry has impeded that expansion.

Last July, a major buyer in Dubai signed a contract to purchase two 40-foot containers’ worth of almonds that were supposed to be shipped in October. Valley Pride booked passage on a vessel operated by Mediterranean Shipping Company — the world’s largest container carrier — for a journey from Oakland to Malta via the Panama Canal, and then on another ship bound for Dubai through the Suez Canal.

But the containers did not make it onto a carrier until Feb. 14. By the time the almonds reached Dubai in March, their value had dropped by $50,000. The buyer claimed that the initial contract had expired and demanded a discount.

Mr. Toor and Mr. Sharifov spent most of February in Dubai, dining with customers to mollify their anger over delays and fend off demands for price breaks.

In a typical week, Valley Pride dispatches 50 containers full of almonds, the vast majority out of Oakland. In recent weeks, the company has struggled to confirm just five bookings. Even those have tended to be “rolled over” in shipping parlance — bumped to a later date — when loading day arrived and no containers could be found.

“That’s happening week after week,” Mr. Blocker says. “They tell us, ‘We don’t have equipment.’ What I hear is, ‘We do have equipment, but we’re not going to give it to you.’”

Before the pandemic, about 40 percent of all containers leaving the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach were loaded with goods and the rest were empty, according to Sea-Intelligence, a shipping consultancy based in Copenhagen. But over the past year, carriers have shipped more empties back to Asia, with the share of outbound loaded containers dropping to 30 percent at Long Beach and 21 percent at the port of Los Angeles.

Carriers have also bypassed Oakland with increasing regularity — something that occurred only about 1 percent of the time two years ago, according to Sea-Intelligence, yet was happening nearly 25 percent of the time by late last year.

Meanwhile, carriers have raised shipping rates. In June, Mediterranean Shipping was charging $1,400 to move a 40-foot container from Oakland to Dubai. This month, the carrier raised the fare to $7,700, while refusing to honor previous rates on bookings that had been repeatedly rolled.

Last year, Valley Pride had logged about $100 million in revenue by the end of March. This year, it has tallied half that.

“I’m pulling my hair out,” Mr. Blocker says. “We’re in a panic situation.”

A Different Route

Just after 8 on a recent morning, Mr. Blocker and Mr. Toor hold a conference call with Peter Friedmann, a former Capitol Hill staffer who runs the Agriculture Transportation Coalition, a Washington advocacy and lobbying group representing exporters.

With the studied patience of a professional wise man, Mr. Friedmann listens to their laments and assures them, by way of consolation, that their problems are a nearly universal affliction.

Hay farmers, who send bales across the Pacific to feed livestock in Asia, are not even bothering to cut their crops this year, given the near-impossibility of finding room on ships.

Valley Pride has looked into hauling almonds east to the port of Savannah, Ga. But the train passage across the country alone could take two weeks.

Mr. Blocker has just returned from a reconnaissance trip to Houston, where containers are more abundant. He has lined up warehouse space and is looking into trucking his cargo there, then shipping out of the Gulf of Mexico.

Trucking to Houston will add $2,800 to the cost of sending a container. And his logistics team has discovered that there are no bookings available from Houston to Dubai until the middle of June. Plus, they entail “premium” charges of $5,200, more than double the going rate of $2,400.

Still, this seems worth pursuing. The alternative is staring at bags of almonds stuck in warehouses.

Mr. Friedmann says he has pressed Biden administration officials to force the carriers to pick up exports in Oakland. He suggests the White House could implore the heads of shipping carriers to make this problem go away, or prepare for executive branch intervention. Some carriers are already expanding export capacity.

Still, he notes that agricultural exporters are competing for space on ships with enormous importers like Amazon and Walmart. They traditionally incur much higher rates than exporters, and can afford to pay the premiums carriers are demanding.

That spread has been widening. Before the pandemic, importers shipping goods from China to the West Coast of the United States paid two to three times as much as American agricultural exporters shipping goods in the opposite direction, according to Freightos, a cargo booking platform. Now, importers are paying 10 times as much.

Mr. Blocker grimaces.

“I like free enterprise,” he says. “I hesitate to get the government and bureaucracy involved. But we are at that point where we are desperate, and we’ve run out of options.”

One of his logistics people pops into the office. She has managed to book five containers from Oakland to Dubai for a couple of weeks forward.

“It’s a piss in a big ocean,” Mr. Blocker says. “I just feel like we’re in the land of the forgotten.”

A Sick Feeling

The next day, Mr. Blocker drives 110 miles north to Manteca to visit his most important customer, Mr. Phippen.

Low gray clouds hover over the Valley as his truck threads a vast expanse of orchards — newly planted almond trees giving way to brushy orange trees, and then a grid of pistachio trees whose branches weave mischievously skyward, like a garden fit for a haunted house.

The towns along the route display the centrality of farming in the Central Valley. He passes a well and pump company, a tractor showroom, a seed distributor.

Mr. Phippen greets him in a conference room tucked in a utilitarian building on the outskirts of town.

A third-generation Central Valley farmer, Mr. Phippen has sunburned cheeks that attest to the hours he spends outside, even well into his seventh decade.

“There isn’t anything in this business that I haven’t done personally,” he says.

He presides over a 2,500-acre orchard, a shelling plant that squeezes almonds out of their armored enclosures, a processing plant that pounds nuts into powdered form, a pair of warehouses and a mountain of discarded shells that he sells as feed to surrounding dairy farms.

Much of almond processing amounts to shaking trees, using heavy equipment to scoop up the resulting rain of material and then feeding the harvest into a diabolical assortment of machines that separate out the valuable bits from the detritus — pebbles, glass shards, twigs.

Mr. Phippen, meticulous about seemingly everything, stops and frowns as he wanders around his warehouse, noticing one bag of almonds that is sagging ever so slightly to the left.

“I want them standing up straight,” he says.

“I’m a control freak,” he adds — not by way of apology, but as a point of pride. “When I have to count on other people to do things for me, I just don’t trust it will get done right.”

His attention to detail has allowed him to cater to the most lucrative markets like Japan and Dubai, where buyers are famously discerning, and where the appearance of his almonds — free of scuffs, no broken pieces — has allowed him to charge a premium.

Mr. Phippen delights in the process and disdains transactions with customers, which he finds stressful and distracting, leaving that part to Mr. Blocker. The two men talk every day, sometimes more than once.

What they talk about lately is how to get containers onto ships. Mr. Phippen’s warehouse is now full of enough almonds to fill 678 containers.

In the busiest months of the year, he needs about 100 containers to handle his usual flow of exports. In January, he shipped 66. In February, 55, and in March fewer than 50.

He flashes a look of incomprehension, of indignation.

“You get to the point where you’re defeated before you even get to work,” he says. “It’s a sick feeling.”

He has shelled out $820,000 to buy 3,000 more storage bins for his warehouses. He is spending another $700,000 to build an additional warehouse.

But he cannot shake the suspicion that he has become a rube in a global economy run for the benefit of others.

“There’s a lot of people taking advantage of the situation,” he says. “Somebody’s screwing with us. We’re getting jacked around here.”