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 for a ticket through the Panama Canal.

Recently, some big cargo ships really have paid that much.

In an interview, the canal's new administrator, Ilya Espino de Marotta, said some ships had paid four million or even five million dollars, calling it a record price.

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

Oil and liquefied natural gas from the US Gulf Coast, bulk American grain, Chilean wine and Chinese consumer goods bound for big markets like New York all pass through it.

The canal's biggest user is the United States, followed by China.

So how did the price get this high?

First, look at how it charges.

About ninety percent of ships use a reservation system to book transit slots months ahead, with prices usually depending on the type and volume of cargo.

The canal also holds back a few slots to auction off to ships with urgent, last-minute 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 October 2025 and March 2026, the average auction price was only around a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

This summer, some bids already topped a million dollars.

Espino de Marotta explains that the recent sky-high prices came from ships that had to transit on a specific date and so bid very aggressively.

She says the market sets the price, and if bids of two or three million dollars show up here and there again, she won't be surprised.

The first force pushing prices up is the Iran war.

Since the conflict between the US and Iran escalated this year, global energy routes have been forced to shift.

Shipments from the Middle East to Asia have been disrupted, and Asian demand for LNG from the US Gulf of Mexico has risen as a result.

Peter Sand, chief analyst at an Oslo-based maritime data platform, says the energy shortage is getting worse by the day, especially in Asia.

He points out that gas carriers rarely book canal transits in advance.

Interestingly, after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, LNG carriers left the Panama Canal to meet demand from Europe.

Espino de Marotta says that now, because the war has disrupted shipping from the Middle East to Asia, those ships are back.

Earlier this year, canal traffic rose for three or four months, to thirty-eight to forty-one ships a day, from thirty-four to thirty-six before the war.

The second force is the weather.

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

That weather is causing serious disruption to global energy markets and coastal infrastructure, and adding further upward pressure on canal prices.

The Panama Canal runs on rainwater.

It has a complex system of locks that lifts ships almost twenty-seven meters above sea level onto a navigable waterway, then lowers them at the other end.

Gatún Lake is the canal's main reservoir, and also the artificial lake ships cross for about thirty kilometers of their transit.

When El Niño brings severe drought, the lake gets shallower, and ships can't pass fully loaded; they have to cut their cargo so they don't run aground.

The canal authority also has to keep enough rainwater in its reservoirs to fill the locks, so it can only cut the number of ships.

Even more crucially, these reservoirs are an important source of drinking water for Panamanians.

José Ramón Icaza, the canal's chairman and Panama's Minister for Canal Affairs, says the lower the lake level, the higher the freshwater surcharge, which ranges from one to six percent of the toll.

The canal publishes a three-month forecast so shipping companies know how deep their ships can sit in the water and how much they'll pay — auctions excepted.

Higher transit costs ripple outward like dominoes, through freight rates and commodities, and finally to the consumer goods ordinary people buy.

For Panama, the canal is practically the nation's lifeline.

Canal business makes up six percent of Panama's economy, and of every dollar the government takes in, twenty cents comes from the canal — more than three billion dollars a year.

The fact that an eighty-kilometer waterway is being pulled around by both war and weather shows just how fragile global trade is today.

If you owned the ship, with a five-million-dollar auction price on one side and penalties for missing your delivery date on the other, which would you choose?