Amazon Drought Pushes Manaus Container Surcharges Toward $1,900 a Box
Four carriers have now published low-water tariffs, most of them biting from mid-September.
Container lines serving Manaus are pricing in another difficult Amazon dry season, publishing low-water surcharges that run from $753 per teu to as much as $1,900 per box as falling river levels threaten access to the Brazilian inland port.
The tariffs are being staged through September and October. Hapag-Lloyd has set a low-water surcharge of $1,350 per container, all types, on cargo moving to and from the Port of Manaus with a tariffing date on or after 12 September. Ocean Network Express has published $1,458 per container, applying to imports from all origins into Manaus from 15 September and to exports from Manaus from 1 October. Maersk has set $1,228 per dry container across all types. CMA CGM has taken a different unit of account, at $753 per teu on long-haul shipments.
The trigger is hydrological rather than commercial. Hapag-Lloyd pointed to the Western Amazon River Authority's advisory indicating a high probability of difficult navigation conditions during the second half of September, and said the charge covers the additional costs and operational challenges of navigating the Amazonas River during periods of low water. The carrier said it will keep monitoring levels and can move the effective date with 30 days' notice if conditions change.
That notice period is now a regulatory requirement rather than a courtesy. Brazil's waterways regulator has told container carriers to give at least 30 days' warning before introducing drought-related surcharges, and has pressed ports, terminals and shipping companies to have contingency plans in place before levels drop.
Manaus is the reason the charges land where they do. The city sits roughly 1,000 miles up the Amazon and is served by ocean container ships calling directly, not by transhipment over a coastal port, so a draught restriction on the river translates into lifted boxes left behind rather than a slower inland leg. The Manaus Free Trade Zone concentrates electronics and consumer goods manufacturing that depends on that direct call for both inbound components and outbound finished units.
The Amazon is not the only river forcing this arithmetic on carriers this month. On the Rhine, CMA CGM has introduced an inland emergency fee as low water cuts available barge capacity, and the pattern is the same in both basins: the ocean leg is unaffected, the river leg carries less per hull, and the difference is recovered through a surcharge rather than through the base rate.
