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Canals are not the world’s biggest shipping choke points
Thousands of kilometres from Suez and Panama, waterways that carry large swathes of global commerce are also vulnerable to disruptions.
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The Israel-Palestine war is currently impacting the Suez Canal as Houthi rebels in Yemen fire missiles at ships passing through the adjoining Red Sea.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Tim Culpan
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When traffic through the Suez Canal ground to a halt in 2021, the extraordinary cost and disruptions to global commerce seemed overwhelming. But 8,000km from the canals of Suez and Panama lie even more important shipping lanes, choke points that could cripple global trade should any disaster befall them.
More than a quarter of goods transport passes through the Malacca Strait, a 40km-wide stretch of water that separates Indonesia to the south-west from Singapore and Malaysia to the north-east. By value, the 27.9 per cent of merchandise sent around the world that traverses this body of water far exceeds the 16.6 per cent that moves along the Suez Canal in Egypt, according to research by Professor Lincoln Pratson at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
