On international routes, why are Asia-Europe container ships avoiding the Suez Canal?
The situation started well before the war in Iran but is very much connected to the conflict.
Avoiding the Red Sea from the Bab al-Mandeb Strait to the Suez Canal dates back to Nov 19, 2023 and the first attack on a container ship by Iran-backed Houthi militias from the coast of Yemen, said CyclOpe, a specialist commodities publication.
The rerouting of ships has now become systematic, said Ronan Boudet, head of container intelligence at Kpler.
They skirt around Africa by following its eastern coast as far as the Cape of Good Hope in southern South Africa before heading back north towards Europe and the Mediterranean.
“With the current situation in the Gulf, we have put several more coins in the machine, it’s not going to get better anytime soon,” Edouard Louis-Dreyfus, chairman of French shipping giant Louis Dreyfus Armateurs, told AFP.
“Today, 70 per cent of the freight traffic that went through the Red Sea in 2023 is being rerouted via the Cape of Good Hope,” added Yves Guillo, a supply chain expert at Efeso, a management consultancy in Paris.
According to data from the International Monetary Fund’s PortWatch platform based on ships’ GPS signals, commercial vessel traffic via the Cape of Good Hope has more than tripled in three years, while traffic through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait has fallen by more than half.
Between Mar 1 and Apr 24 this year, an average of 20 commercial vessels went round the Cape of Good Hope every day compared with six in the same period in 2023.
By comparison, traffic in the Red Sea has plummeted: from 18 transits per day through Bab al-Mandeb between March and April 2023, the average fell to five three years later.
