Access to the Panama Canal will be reduced for a year due to lack of rain, a consequence of climate change and the El Niño phenomenon, the authority of the waterway that connects the oceans announced on Thursday August 24. Atlantic and Pacific through Central America. Since July 30, the number of ships allowed to transit each day has been reduced from 40 to 32 and their draft limited to 13.4 meters. “Today we plan to extend these measures for a year,” said Ilya Espino, deputy administrator of the channel. Unless in September, October and November heavy rain falls in the watershed and fills the lakes. » This announcement should allow shipowners to better “plan” their future passages and avoid the phenomenon of congestion: on Thursday, there were 130 ships waiting at the entrances to the waterway and up to 160 a few days earlier. The waiting time has therefore increased: from three to five days normally, it reached up to nineteen days to return to eleven this week.
$200 million shortfall 80 km long, the canal sees 6% of world maritime trade pass through and is widely used, in particular by the United States, China and Japan. Each lock uses water, fresh, coming from upstream: on average 200,000 m³ are needed to transit a ship.The water comes from the Gatun and Alajuela Lakes watershed, which also supplies drinking water to half of the country’s 4.2 million people. This situation pushes those responsible for the canal to seek new sources of water: “We must find solutions so that we can continue to be a route of primary importance for international trade. If we don’t adapt, we will die,” said channel administrator Ricaurte Vasquez Morales.In the meantime, the reduction in traffic and draft translates into a drop in revenue for the canal and therefore for the country. For 2024, the canal authority forecasts that the tonnage of goods passing through the isthmus will be “less than 500 million tons”, compared to 518 million in 2022. toll business which reached more than three billion dollars last year.
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