Panama Canal will stick to plan for toll increase

The spokesman’s remarks followed reports that the French company estimates that it will save more than US$200,000 per trip by sending 4,000 teu container ships around the Cape of Good Hope on the homeward leg of its PEX 2 service between the Caribbean and Asia. CMA CGM said that the savings were possible even after adding a tenth ship to the service to maintain the integrity of its port calls.

Maersk is also believed to be considering sending its ships round Cape Horn rather than taking the much shorter but more expensive route through the Panama Canal. The May increase in the cost of using the Canal will be the third recently, and will see the cost per teu increase by 14.3%. In May 2008 tolls were increased by 16.56% per teu.

In 2006, when Panama’s President Martin Torrijos announced the ambitious plan to widen the canal and build new locks to accommodate post-Panamax ships, he said that the cost would be partly borne by toll increases. However, this did not take account of the subsequent global economic turmoil, which has caused shippersto radically reassess their costs in order to survive.