Is the giant container ship and the global trade boom it spurred nearly over?
The disaster (aka the big ship) that struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore raises an important question: Is the global trade boom enabled by the shipping container just about over?
Should it be over?
As The Washington Post recently pointed out, “big ships can cause big problems”.
During the Covid crisis four years ago, it was an enormous container ship Ever Given that blocked the Suez Canal and thereby the passage of goods between Europe and Asia.
This time, it’s the Dali, another enormous cargo ship, which has done more than temporarily cut off a key shipping route. It’s taken down a crucial piece of infrastructure on America’s eastern seaboard. Though Baltimore is only the 17th largest port in the United States, it’s the top destination for car shipments and a major coal depot. Last year, it handled $81 billion of foreign cargo. In bringing down the 1.6-mile-long Francis Scott Key bridge, the Dali has dealt a massive blow to trade in the eastern United States.
Both ships were huge — the Ever Given some 1,300 feet long; the Dali around 980 feet. But they are by no means unique. Ships have got bigger in the past few decades because it’s cheaper and more efficient to transport more containers at one go than do it in multiple trips.
But the truth is that giant ships, bearing lots of full containers, are hugely vulnerable. They serve as soft targets for state and non-state actors any time they travel through an area roiled by a current or brewing conflict. We saw that when the Houthis began to attack container ships and oil tankers in the Bab al-Mandab Strait in order to put pressure on Israel and its backers to cease its assault on Gaza.
As The Post noted, these big container ships carry enormous risks, not least “hitting a bridge, running sideways in a canal or getting fired upon by militants”.
So what about the cargo they carry, those shipping containers that have changed the rhythm and practice of global trade?
In 2006, economist Marc Levinson wrote a fascinating book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. He argued that the shipping container was no less than a “revolution”. Until April 26, 1956, when 58 shipping containers were transported from Newark to Houston on an ageing tanker, the world merely “was full of small manufacturers selling locally”. Then the container changed everything by making shipping cheap. ( Click here to read This Week, Those Books on the shipping containers and world trade.)
But could container ships and thereby the shipping container be running out of time?
Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com
