The UN Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) final Global Trade Update of 2025 is a very interesting report. Far from the death of international marine trade, the volume (by value) is surging 7% in 2025. That’s largely due to the increased trade between Asia and the developing world, largely in the South and Africa. US trade is distinctly off, but that’s not stopping the rest of the world from profiting by international trade.
Trade inflation increased in Q2 and Q3 2025, but is set to decrease in Q4 2025. The graph shows overall price of traded goods: trailing four quarters and quarterly growth. The data do not include services.
This chart shows that trade indeed has the power to drive costs down for consumers. Tariffs may have a short-term effect, but international trade finds a way to get around the restrictions. No market in the world is so big that you have to trade there. And ultimately the futility of tariffs hits home, and countries back off from imposing them. A quadrant diagram of exports and imports shows how East Asia and Africa are driving global trade now. They are the two regions showing positive percentage growth in both exports and imports through September 2025. (Again services are excluded).
Services trade growth continued to be strong. This chart shows China, India, Japan, and South Africa led export growth by percentage, while many developed countries continued to increase major imports of services.
The whole report makes interesting reading. Kudos to the authors. It can be found here:
The Getting to Zero Coalition and the Global Maritime Forum have issued a new report At a Crossroads: Annual Progress Report on Green Shipping Corridors 2025. Green shipping corridors are a very impactful way of moving toward zero emissions in the maritime area. They can coordinate many players by providing a specific attainable goal— zero emissions on a specific route for specific ship types. These corridors are independent of efforts by the EU to create incentives and penalties for carbon emissions and reductions, and of efforts by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to reach a consensus on rules and measures for intrnational ocean shipping. Many times they are organized by specific ports and specific ocean carriers. Often they try to focus efforts on supply chains for specific fuels at those ports.
I think these efforts are extremely important. They can show how to provide reasonably priced fuel supply chains and how to coordinate investors, ocean shipping players, and financial institutions as well as governments. These experiments need to be tried.
The report has been published since 2022, effectively the beginning of the green shipping corridors movement. Steady gains have been made, and today there are 84 initiatives catalogued, with 305 stakeholders. 25 more initiatives have been recorded.
Source: Annual Progress Report on Green Shipping Corridors, 2025.
An interesting section discussed progress at the four corridors that have reached the highest stage in the journey: the Realization stage. Three of them are short-sea routes in Europe. The longest runs bulkers from Australia to China and other Far East ports.
Stockholm-Turku ferry, Finland to Sweden, biomethane;
Vaasa-Umeå ferry, Finland to Sweden, biomethane;
Australia-East Asia bulk carriers, iron ore, ammonia;
Oslo-Rotterdam container ships, hydrogen.
I found it interesting that the three short routes fund the difference between green and dirty fuels by entering pooling agreements to sell credits to other shipping lines, under the EU policies. The long ammonia route alone is driven by private firms involved in the trade, to help them meet dramatically lower emissions goals, with fuel costs not funded but expected to drop to a reasonable level as the infrastructure is built out. China, Korea, and Japan all have goals for reduced emissions from shipping which the iron ore route will help with.
Four recommendations emerge from the report’s assessment of the green corridor potential and progress.
Pursuing strategies to break the inertia and keep the momentum;
Connecting cargo owner willingness to pay to the corridors;
Taking an active stance at the IMO;
Tapping into or replicating emerging national policy instruments.
Significant issues for now are:
Delay of the IMO Net-Zero framework; participants may wait for more clarity.
Will the cargo owner be willing to pay for green shipping on the corridor? The evidence so far is not good.
Influencing public policies to support investment and regulation.
Staying focused on truly green corridors that deploy zero-emission assets rather than fossil fuels, do it early, and iron out the kinks.
This chart shows the right and wrong approaches:
Source: Annual Progress Report on Green Shipping Corridors, 2025, page 25
The study is available in PDF at this link. It contains an Appendix listing all the current Green Corridors in the portfolio at present.
I was very happy to read this summary of the state of green corridor adoption. Keeping this movement going will play an important part in maritime decarbonization.
Gary Howard, Middle East correspondent November 27, 2025
It seems that there is enough extra capacity in container shipping carriers’ fleets so that Chinese-built or Chinese owned ships need not be used on Asia-Pacific routes. Carriers have already announced plans to redeploy Chinese-built ships to other routes. So these shipping lines won’t be paying the US port access fees Trump put into place.
Will anyone be paying them? That’s the question now. The Trump administration’s estimates of the revenue these charges will bring in are way too high. No big money for US shipping improvements.
It’s another example of international ocean carriers and shippers’ immense innovativeness when a barrier to trade is erected. These entrepreneurs will always find a way around the barrier. One example here is ships calling at Canadian ports like Prince Rupert or Mexican ports like Ensenada instead of their US counterparts, avoiding the fees, but still able to provide good service via rail into US customers.
Something similar will happen with US tariffs. Enterprises will find a way around the rules.
That’s been happening since the dawn of navigational history, if not before. The American Revolution was in part about avoidance of requirements imposed by England on the shipment of goods between England and its colonies. The American cargo fleet, run by entrepreneurial sea captains and shipping firms, was an end-around the British shipment rules. Imposing those rules made the Americans mad, and added to the furor about independence.
With the Trump tariffs, too, international commerce will find a way. The result will be much lower tariff fee collections than Trump’s ridiculous projections. It won’t pay for much of anything, let alone trillions. We’re only seeing big numbers now because shippers get caught in the uncertainty; thinking the tariffs are off, they ship the goods, but by the time the goods arrive there’s a tariff again. But once burned, twice shy!
We haven’t seen big declines in Asia-West Coast trade yet, even though container unloadings at the West coast ports are down somewhat. But they are coming. Once firms get serious about minimizing landed cost, shipments could drop another 30% or more. And firms will make sure what they do have to ship is paying lower rates, even if they need to shift the source to another country.
The long-term lesson of history is that Tariffs are a weak tool for boosting a nation’s interests. Most often they wind up just making folks in trade mad, and making them less likely to support the tariffing nation’s interests in any way.
Supply Chain and Logistics 