The U.S. announced on Monday that it is forming a coalition to restore a safe pathway for shipping through the Red Sea. Ten countries had signed up as of Monday, and more are expected.
Their job will have to be more than just supervisory, as the Houthis show no sign of giving up the attacks and (inevitably) have threatened to take on the coalition’s warships. Those threats may be bravado, but commercial shippers (and their insurers) will need to be reassured that the risk posed by the Houthis is no longer anything they have to worry about (too much).
But for now, shippers are increasingly avoiding the Red Sea despite the longer sailing time that entails.
The Financial Times has an update:
Container shipowners increasingly abandoned one of the world’s busiest trading routes on Tuesday, with many of the world’s largest cargo vessels diverting to avoid the Red Sea amid mounting attacks from Iranian-backed rebels in the region.
AP Møller-Maersk, which operates the world’s second-largest container shipping fleet, became the latest to reroute its vessels around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope because of the “highly escalated security situation”…
Data compiled by MariTrace, a ship-tracking service, showed that as of Tuesday evening, only 210 ships were traversing the Red Sea, the route to and from the Suez Canal, one of the biggest changes in international trading routes since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago. By comparison, there were about 330 vessels traversing the region last month…
Maersk’s decision coincides with similar moves by other shipping groups. Taiwan-based Evergreen Marine said this week it had “decided to temporarily stop accepting Israeli cargo with immediate effect”, and instructed its container ships to “suspend navigation through the Red Sea until further notice”.
German company Hapag-Lloyd diverted all ships on Monday to go via the Cape of Good Hope, MSC decided on Friday to reroute some of its services and Marseille-based CMA CGM is taking similar action.
CMA CGM said it had rerouted some vessels at present sailing to and from the US, North Europe and Asia or the Indian subcontinent to travel via the southern tip of Africa, and instructed others to reach safe areas and pause their journeys until further notice. Wallenius Wilhelmsen said on Tuesday that it expected a decision to reroute vessels around Africa to add between one to two weeks to voyage durations.
The attacks in the area risk disrupting global supply chains that depend on the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. The waterway accounts for 30 per cent of all container ship traffic and is a vital conduit for crude oil shipments. Retailers have also started warning of supply chain disruptions that could result from the vessel diversions….
End-of-history types would say that this sort of thing was not supposed to happen “in the 21st century” — meanwhile, the 19th century, mysteriously still with us, invested in drones.