The security crisis in the Red Sea is particularly damaging to Europe, as it has almost halved commercial traffic through the Suez Canal, the great artificial artery of modernity, along with the Panama Canal. This crisis also has winners and Morocco, for the moment, is one of them. We will now see why.
Suez traffic has already fallen by 45% since the beginning of December. Many shipping, oil and gas companies have decided to divert ships via the Cape of Good Hope route (South Africa) due to the possibility of being attacked by Houthi (Shia) militias in the Strait of Bab al-Mandab or in the Gulf of Aden. On Friday, despite the fact that it had a military escort, the British oil tanker Martin Luanda was seriously affected by a ballistic missile that caused a large fire on board. Companies are afraid, insurance has become more expensive and rates have risen more than expenses, as La Vanguardia reported yesterday.
Costs have risen by 21%, and the price of charters by 150%. Shipping companies are taking advantage of the crisis to fatten the profit and loss account and improve the stock market capitalization. Containers need to be transshipped. They are looking for cheap, efficient and well-located ports that serve as a logistical base for the new route. And Morocco has them: Casablanca and Tanger Med, especially Tanger Med on the southern side of the Strait of Gibraltar. The Eastern Mediterranean is now too far away. It is the revenge of geography and the bones of the engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, creator of the Suez Canal, are being moved in his grave in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
"Tangier is today the port on the rise", point out sources in the sector, who follow the Red Sea crisis to the minute. Tangier Med, one of the great Moroccan strategic bets at the beginning of the century, had already been positioned at the end of 2023 as the first Mediterranean port in container traffic and has overtaken Algeciras, Valencia and Barcelona. The keys to success are the following: the Strait of Gibraltar, a privileged location between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, between Africa and Europe, high capacity facilities, lower wages and lower environmental costs, circumstances that favor more competitive rates than those of the neighboring port of Algeciras.
Tangier Med, twenty kilometers from Ceuta, is a good port for the transshipment of goods. So much so, that the Kingdom of Morocco is already promoting the construction of another large commercial port in Nador, 50 kilometers from Melilla. The strategy seems clear: favor the creation of two large areas of economic activity in Moroccan territory, very close to the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla. This strategy is now being benefited by the Red Sea crisis, of unpredictable duration.
The main ones affected by the partial strangulation of the Suez route are, for now, the ports of the central and eastern Mediterranean. Genoa, Gioia, Malta, Trieste, on the Adriatic, historic port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Greek port of Piraeus, connected to the railway axis of Eastern Europe. These routes are now far from a revalued Strait of Gibraltar. The ports of the Western Mediterranean come out better in the logistics competition, say sources in the sector. The data for Algeciras, Valencia and Barcelona are not bad. "This is the photo of the month of January 2024, a photo in motion", they warn.
There are nerves in Italy, a country that sends 40% of its exports to the Far East and that must import liquefied natural gas from several countries, including the emirate of Qatar, to compensate for the renunciation of cheap Russian gas (Italy canceled the day before yesterday a shipment of gas from Qatar that was destined for a regasification plant in the Adriatic). Trieste, a very ambitious port for China during the idyll between Rome and Beijing (2018-2021), may lose strategic value. The old Venetian route is too far today. The Italian institute Ipsi, dedicated to the study of international relations, predicts that the Red Sea crisis will mean two more points of inflation for the European Union. It cannot be surprising, therefore, that in a matter of weeks the Government of Italy has become one of the main advocates of a European military operation in the Red Sea. Operation in which the Government of Spain does not plan to participate.
Morocco gains logistical weight and that means political power. The situation is paradoxical. The strangulation of Bab al-Mandab benefits the port of Tangier and the war in Gaza hinders the public display of good relations between Morocco and Israel, favored by Donald Trump during the last days of his term in 2020. In exchange for the full reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries, Israel unilaterally recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. Israel is today a major supplier of weapons and security systems to Morocco and there is no indication that the Gaza war is harming this nexus, despite the pro-Palestinian sympathies of the Moroccan people.
