The situation in the Suez passage it is more serious than expected. After the incident that caused a 400-metre container ship to run aground in the longitudinal direction, closing the passage to other ships, it was said that it would take five days to resolve the situation. We now know that the initial estimate was too optimistic: the operations to free the Ever Given, the giant flying the Panamanian flag, from the seabed, they will require longer than expected. “At the moment we are unable to make any forecasts,” Egyptian authorities said on Saturday evening. At work there is also a company that had collaborated in the recovery of the wreck of the Costa Concordia, near the island of Giglio.
This time, however, the case is more complex and the economic consequences impossible to calculate. Even when the Canal is reopened, in fact, it will take a long time before the delays in deliveries - which continue to accumulate - are recovered and the dynamics of world trade, already tried by the pandemic, return to normal. There is also a risk that excess oncoming traffic will cause the collapse of the ports of call. At the moment, between cargo ships and supertankers, they are more than 300 hundred vessels stranded in the Red Sea, in those 190 kilometers of water where 30% of the world's containers pass each year (which contain, among other things, 60% of Chinese goods for Europe, 80 billion products from and to Italy and the 16% of the needs of the German chemical giants). According to estimates reported by the Bloomberg agency, the value of maritime traffic blocked at the Suez Canal is worth $9,6 billion a day.
Owners who do not want to queue are forced to circumnavigate Africa, a route that requires at least seven days of navigation more and exposes the crews to attacks by pirates. Not to mention the problem of costs: to go through the Cape of Good Hope you need 800 tons more fuel, which raises the travel bill by about 400 thousand euros. On the other hand, every day of delay in the delivery of goods costs between 15 and 30 thousand euros in penalties.
Meanwhile, they also get worse the indirect consequences of the Suez accident on the global economy: the price of oil has risen by 5%, the rates for chartering ships have shot up between 30 and 70% in a week and the prices of containers, already unobtainable because they are blocked in around the world since Covid, they have quadrupled on some routes.
