Severe El Niño drought conditions from 2023 to 2024 forced the Panama Canal to cut daily transits down to 24 vessels per day, and it was only a shift to La Niña conditions that facilitated the increase back to 36 daily transits in 2025, with the critical Lake Gatun reaching near maximum capacity in early 2026. The latest forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is that El Niño will emerge in mid-2026 and last through the rest of the year, with the agency looking at a 25 percent chance of a very strong El Niño that would hike the likelihood of canal disruptions. It’s times like these that I want to give a big shout out to the Strait of Malacca between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra for evidently being the only normal bottleneck in the dang world; while the Strait of Hormuz falls to chaos and the Panama Canal can barely keep the water flowing and the Suez Canal gets jammed up by the Ever Given, it’s times like these that we have to give it up to Malacca for just keeping the global economy humming.
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