The latest Suez crisis and the economic fallout

The latest crisis surrounding the Suez Canal appears to have come to a favourable resolution, avoiding a full-blown disaster. The world was watching with bated breath for almost 10 days, as the Suez Canal drama was playing out last week. A Japanese container ship, on its way from Asia to the Dutch port of Rotterdam, got stuck diagonally in the Suez Canal on March 23, 2021, and traffic on the canal came to a standstill. The ship Even Given was travelling north on the canal and turned right. Both its bow (the front) and the stern (the tail) hit the banks of the canal, leaving about 400 vessels stranded on the southern and the northern segments. A group of an international crew worked feverishly day and night to dislodge the container ship and succeeded in doing so on March 29 to refloat it. But the fallout is already starting to emerge. Some of the ships coming from Asia are going around the Cape of Good Hope to reach Europe. Others that were stuck in the Mediterranean turned around and are now heading for the Atlantic Ocean to reach the Asian destinations.

The rescue operation of Ever Given gripped the imagination of billions around the globe who were watching live on TV and the Internet as the leviathan, laden with 18,000 containers, was stuck for almost a week, and tugboats attempted to refloat it. The 1,312-foot, quarter-mile long, 200,000 metric ton container ship became the subject of wide-spread speculations. At one stage, Egypt's President, Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, stepped in and ordered a back-up plan, including preparations for removing containers from the vessel, according to news reports last Sunday.