The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author

by Marc Levinson

Yet such an imbalance in trade can have a silver lining. After China joined the World Trade Organization in 2002, its trade surplus with the United States exploded, such that by 2009, two and a half times as many containers moved from East Asia to North America as from North America to East Asia. Entrepreneurs quickly figured out that low westbound freight rates made it sensible to fill those containers with low-value goods, such as wastepaper and grain. In 2014, U.S. farmers exported more than 50,000 40-foot boxes loaded with soybeans, a commodity long deemed unsuitable for shipping in containers. Greater use of containers for agricultural exports, in turn, opened doors to previously unimagined markets: when Canadian farmers discovered that Asian buyers would pay extra for barley and canola that could be traced to a specific farm, containers with single-use plastic liners offered an inexpensive way to move the product.