Chile’s earthquake: tallying the economic toll in your town

This photo by Flickr user Pablo/T shows earthquake damage in Temuco, Chile.

The tragic earthquake in Chile may be a hemisphere away, but the economic ripples still could reach your backyard.

With casualty reports still coming in and a recovery effort under way, the less urgent ramifications of the temblor won’t be assessed for a while.  But business journalists may want to delve around for local impact.

Chile’s coastal orientation and 2,700-mile north-south extension give it a varied terrain and climate that is reflected in its  products.  It’s the world’s chief exporter of copper – and by some estimates has a 200-year reserve – as well as a major global supplier of agricultural products such as grapes, wine and pears.

As a southern hemisphere country, it summers when North America and other trade partners winter. The inverse seasons mean that right now a perhaps surprising range of U.S. companies may be concerned about gaps in the supply of Chilean produce.

Chile’s nationalized copper industry was disrupted by the quake; here’s a fresh Reuters story that predicts a resulting hike to copper futures.  That’s important to any heavy copper consumers in your region, from utilities to construction companies.  Check Copper.org, the trade group, for other ideas.  And you might speak with local investment bankers or the top purchasing executives at area companies about demand for the metal.

Produce is another industry with potentially wide-ranging ripples from Chile’s earthquake. As this recent piece from Philadelphia Inquirer writer Linda Loyd illustrates, Philadelphia-area ports receive 65 percent of all Chilean fruit coming to the United States. The remainder enters through Los Angeles.

Even if you’re nowhere near Philly or LA, check with area trucking and logistics firms that transport food; check with grocers and restaurateurs and food-processing companies about supply concerns.  And if you’re in a competitive market – Oregon, for example — check with growers there to see if they’ll be scurrying to fill new orders that offset any shortfalls from Chile.

This site, for example, said Chile has been the top raisin supplier to the U.S. since 2000.   If the fruit is delayed in harvest, processing or transit, where does that leave Kellogg and its bran flakes?  You might get other ideas or expert input from the Produce Marketing Association, which has extensive country pages.

The country has a very controversial salmon industry that in recent years has been affected by an epidemic virus and other concerns. If your audience includes heavy salmon consumers, producers, distributors or retailers, you may want to check into the latest on this angle, too.  Lots of conflicting claims out there, so be careful.

The United States exports its share of goods to Chile, too. Manufacturers and growers may well be revamping demand estimates as a result of the earthquake.

This U.S. Department of Agriculture site offers a lot of backgrounders on the free-trade agreement between the U.S.and Chile, as well as a trove of commodity-specific information you can use to generate story ideas.  To narrow down to crops from your region (or the needs of food manufacturers and others), click on the Commodity Fact Sheets at the bottom of the page.

And this California site documenting that state’s trade with Chile is a gold mine of statistics and well worth perusing. It’ll give you an idea of what to ask commerce officials in your state about trade with Chile.

Here’s a link to the Banco Central de Chile (the Central Bank) which handily provides an English-language edition of monthly import-export data and other statistics.

Other areas to consider:

Corporate aid. Any companies in your area providing charitable aid, expertise, commercial supplies?

Tourism. Here’s the U.S. state department’s Chile site reflecting  the earthquake-related travel alert. A Google search turns up a plethora of Chile tourism sites; to narrow it down, I’d contact local travel agents and airlines to find out about the frequency of connections to Chile from your region, passenger counts and other data.

People. As with the catastrophe in Haiti, be creative in finding experts and others with relationships to Chile. Look for student groups at local universities, study-abroad programs, faculty at international studies programs, professional groups that include Chilean members or those with business experience in the area.

Also,  as with Haiti, check with banks and money-transfer services such as Western Union to see if there’s any uptick in activity by concerned friends and family in the states trying to send funds abroad.  Here’s a somewhat stale press release outlining Western Union’s business affiliations in Chile.