穿过巴拿马运河要花五百万美元：战争和干旱让船票贵到创纪录

Five million dollars: that's the price some big cargo ships have recently paid to get through the Panama Canal.

The Panama Canal is about eighty kilometers long, links the Pacific and the Atlantic, and nearly six percent of the world's trade passes through it.

Oil and liquefied natural gas shipped from the US Gulf of Mexico, American grain, Chilean wine and Chinese goods bound for New York all use this canal.

The canal's biggest user is the United States; second is China.

Normally, about ninety percent of ships book their transit time months in advance, and the price depends mainly on the type and amount of cargo.

The canal also holds back a small number of slots to auction off to ships with last-minute urgent needs.

The starting auction price is a hundred thousand dollars, and this season's average winning bid is about three hundred and eighty thousand.

Between last October and this March, the average was only around a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

But this summer, some ships bid more than a million dollars.

The canal's newly appointed administrator, Ilya Espino de Marotta, says some ships recently paid four million, even five million dollars — a record.

She says the market sets the price, and she wouldn't be surprised to see bids of two or three million dollars again.

Why so expensive?

The first reason is war.

This year, the conflict between the US and Iran escalated, disrupting energy shipments from the Middle East to Asia.

Asian demand for American liquefied natural gas rose fast, and many gas carriers have to leave the US Gulf of Mexico and go through the Panama Canal to reach Asia.

A shipping analyst says Asia's energy shortage is getting worse by the day.

He adds that gas carriers rarely book in advance; when they need to go on short notice, auctions are the only option.

In fact, after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, many gas carriers switched to Europe and left the Panama Canal.

Now, because of the war, they're back.

Earlier this year, daily transits rose from thirty-four to thirty-six ships to thirty-eight to forty-one, for three or four months.

The second reason is weather.

Recently, because of extreme weather linked to El Niño, the canal authority cut daily transits to thirty-two ships.

The Panama Canal runs on rainwater.

It has a system of locks that lifts ships almost twenty-seven meters into the canal and lowers them again at the other end.

Each lift uses huge amounts of fresh water from reservoirs such as Gatún Lake, and ships sail about thirty kilometers across Gatún Lake.

In a drought, the lake gets shallower, so ships can't be fully loaded or they risk running aground.

What's more, these reservoirs are also where Panamanians get their drinking water, so not all of it can go to the canal.

The lower the lake, the higher the freshwater surcharge the canal adds — about one to six percent of the toll.

With more ships wanting to pass and fewer able to, prices naturally go up.

Rising tolls also ripple outward, affecting freight rates and raw materials, and in the end the things ordinary people buy.

For Panama, the canal is a pillar of the economy, making up six percent of the country's economy.

Of every dollar the government takes in, twenty cents comes from the canal — more than three billion dollars a year.

If you ran a shipping company, would you spend millions more to arrive on time?