Canals Aren’t Even the World's Biggest Shipping Chokepoints
Thousands of miles from Suez and Panama, waterways that carry large swathes of global commerce are vulnerable to disruptions that will shake up supply chains.
The ripple effects will be devastating.
Photographer: Maria Feck/BloombergWhen traffic through the Suez Canal ground to a halt in 2021, the extraordinary cost and disruptions to global commerce seemed overwhelming. But 5,000 miles from the canals of Suez and Panama lie even more important shipping lanes, chokepoints that could cripple global trade should any disaster befall them.
More than a quarter of goods transport passes through a 25-mile wide stretch of water that separates Indonesia to the southwest from Singapore and Malaysia to the northeast, known as the Malacca Strait. By value, the 27.9% of merchandise sent around the world that traverses this body of water far exceeds the 16.6% that move along the Suez Canal in Egypt, according to research by Professor Lincoln Pratson at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.