CMA CGM turned the canal's drought into a standing surcharge line
The water came back but the fee did not leave; a temporary charge has quietly become part of the freight rate, and shippers on the Asia-to-Americas run are paying for a lake they do not use.
The French carrier posted a "Panama Canal Adjustment Factor" of $320 per container unit in late July and has already told customers it climbs to $500 per unit from September 10 (CMA CGM customer notice via Tradlinx, Aug 17). That would be unremarkable if the crisis it billed for still existed. It does not. Gatun Lake refilled to near capacity by February and the canal was running 38 transits a day at full draft as recently as spring (ShipFinex canal review, Feb 2026). The fee survived the rain.
The canal authority's own behavior makes the surcharge harder to defend. In August it said its latest draft reductions would not change how many ships transit each day (Panama Canal Authority advisory cited by Tradlinx, Aug 17). Passages are available. Queues exist because demand is strong, not because the locks are empty.
Then the weather turned again. Below-expected rainfall pushed the authority to cut Neopanamax booking slots to just nine a day from September 3, with Panamax slots falling to 25 and then 23 by mid-September, and to lower maximum draft in two steps through October 1 (gCaptain, Aug 21). So there are now two stories running at once: a canal tightening access in real time, and carriers who priced the tightening before it arrived. The dates tell who moved first. CMA CGM's factor took effect July 25, MSC keys its charge to gate-in from mid-August, Hapag-Lloyd to sailing date in September, each line triggering on its own schedule months ahead of the slot cuts (Tradlinx, Aug 17). The second mover is the canal. The first mover keeps the margin.
Name the actors. The Panama Canal Authority wants revenue and political cover; every restriction it announces reminds Panama's assembly why the waterway needs a new reservoir, and its fiscal year delivered a record anyway, with profit up about 9.5 percent to $3.45 billion even during the last drought (Reuters via gCaptain, Oct 25, fiscal year ended September). CMA CGM, MSC and Hapag-Lloyd want to recover canal fees, auction costs and slower rotations without touching their headline freight rates. Shippers moving furniture, apparel and auto parts from Asia to the US East Coast want predictability and are getting a moving target instead, since each carrier triggers its fee on a different date and none has published what happens when the lake fills.
The trigger this month is rainfall, or the lack of it. The slow pressure underneath is older: the canal runs on fresh water from one watershed that also supplies half of Panama's drinking water, and every ship through the locks dumps millions of gallons into the sea. Droughts made that arithmetic visible in 2023 and 2024. What changed since is that carriers learned the lesson of those years, which is that a canal emergency is a pricing opportunity, and pricing opportunities should not be allowed to expire.
A drought lasts a season, but a line item lasts forever, and the carriers have learned to prefer the line item.
The historical comparison is the Red Sea. When Houthi attacks pushed carriers around the Cape of Good Hope in early 2024, lines layered war-risk and diversion surcharges onto Asia-Europe rates, and those surcharges persisted well after the threat eased because customers had stopped auditing them. A surcharge introduced under duress becomes a list price under habit. The counter-example argues the other way: after the 2021 Ever Given blockage cleared, Suez Canal tolls and carrier rates reverted within weeks because the constraint was a single stuck ship, visible and finite. A watershed is not finite or visible. Nobody can point to a day the drought ends, so nobody can force a refund.
Follow the money downstream. Against a Shanghai-to-New York spot rate of $8,706 per forty-foot box on August 13, CMA CGM charges its $500 on each twenty-foot unit twice over, so a forty-foot box carries $1,000 of Panama factor, close to 11.5 percent of the headline rate, roughly four times Hapag-Lloyd's equivalent add-on of about 3 percent (Drewry World Container Index figures via Tradlinx, Aug 17). The spread matters: importers who contracted with the cheapest carrier in January are discovering that the surcharge line, not the base rate, decides their landed cost. Meanwhile the canal itself monetizes desperation directly, auctioning last-minute slots that fetched a record $4.6 million from a single tanker earlier this year, and will now split auction bidders into four groups from September 3 to spread the scarcity across LNG carriers, bulk ships, boxships and tankers (gCaptain, Aug 21). The drought pays everyone upstream of the cargo.
Who absorbs it is the American importer, and behind them the American consumer of everything that used to ride cheaply through the isthmus. More than half of canal transits touch a US port, and over three-quarters of the cargo by value does (canal statistics cited by Tradlinx, Aug 17). Retailers stocking fall inventory are paying a water tax set in Paris and collected in Balboa, on a commodity, fresh water, that no futures market prices and no contract hedges.
The observable sequence if this read is right: watch whether the surcharges survive the rains. The canal's own forecasters expect the wet season to restore Gatun Lake, as it did last winter, yet no carrier has published a sunset clause on its Panama factor. If December arrives with full drafts, normal slot counts, and CMA CGM's $500 line intact, the surcharge has become permanent infrastructure of pricing rather than a response to a shortage. That is the confirmation.
What breaks the read is simpler. If the authority restores 36-plus daily slots by November and MSC or Hapag-Lloyd publicly drops its Panama charge, the fees were genuinely cost-recovery all along and CMA CGM's higher number will face customer defection on the next contracting round. The counterfactual is testable within one quarter, which is rare in shipping and worth using.
A drought lasts a season, but a line item lasts forever, and the carriers have learned to prefer the line item.