Global oil shipping crisis: How geopolitical tanker hoarding and colonial-era infrastructure failures deepen energy inequality
Original framing: “Saudi Arabia denies buying oil tankers after Iraq blames it for higher shipping costs - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Iraqi port workers in Basra, interviewed by *Al Jazeera* in 2021, described how privatization under the 2003 US occupation left them with no bargaining power against tanker owners. Women-led fishing cooperatives in Sri Lanka, displaced by the 2019 tanker crisis, have called for a ‘Blue Economy’ model that prioritizes local food security over oil transport. Meanwhile, the *International Transport Workers’ Federation* reports that 90% of seafarers—who keep the system running—are from Global South nations but earn less than $1,000/month, making them invisible stakeholders in this crisis.
This shipping crisis is not a bilateral spat but a symptom of how neoliberalism has hollowed out maritime governance, turning essential infrastructure into a speculative asset controlled by a cartel of petrostates and corporations.
The erasure of indigenous knowledge—like the Miskito *usha* system—mirrors the broader erasure of alternative economic models, from the Igbo *àgbà* councils to the Chinese *guanxi* networks, all of which prioritized equity over extraction. Historical parallels, from the 1973 oil embargo to the 1956 Suez Crisis, reveal that today’s hoarding is not an anomaly but the logical outcome of a system designed to concentrate power in the hands of those who inherited colonial shipping monopolies. The trickster lens exposes the absurdity of framing this as a ‘denial’ story: the real denial is that no one is held accountable for a crisis that could have been foreseen—and prevented—by restoring the very governance models that were dismantled in the name of ‘progress.’ The path forward lies in reclaiming shipping as a public good, not through moral suasion but through structural interventions: indigenous-led commons, algorithmic transparency, and reparations-linked infrastructure, all of which would force the system to confront its own fragility.