What’s the single most important concentration of infrastructure keeping America supplied with goods? The Los Angeles/Long Beach port complex, which handles around 40% of the country’s containerized imports. What’s the second most important? One could make a strong case for the expanded Panama Canal.
America could never have handled the historic import deluge of the past two years if Panama had not built the third set of locks, the larger “Neopanamax” locks that debuted in 2016 and brought much higher-capacity container ships from Asia to East Coast and Gulf Coast ports.
The Panama Canal has been one of the big winners of the COVID-era shipping boom. But now, the pace of growth is slowing, mirroring a trend seen across much of global trade, and the canal is feeling more effects from the Ukraine-Russia war and China’s COVID lockdowns.
The waterway handled its highest ever shipping flows in fiscal year 2021, which ended in September. Panama Canal Universal Measurement System (PC/UMS) net tonnage rose 8.8% versus FY 2020. In the first half of FY 2022, between October and March, PC/UMS net tonnage rose 0.8% from the same period a year before. Container-ship PC/UMS tonnage rose 8.5% and liquefied petroleum gas tonnage increased 11.1%. Offsetting those gains, liquefied natural gas carrier tonnage plunged 31.1%.
“I’m still confident we’ll do as good as last year [overall], if not better,” Ilya Espino de Marotta, deputy administrator of the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), told American Shipper.
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