Global Supply Chains

Six chains the world runs on — energy, chips, minerals, manufactured goods, food and steel — drawn from where they start to where they end, through the nine chokepoints they cannot do without. Five of those nine lie between Muslim-majority coasts. Pick a chain to see only its routes; click a numbered chokepoint to see what passes through it.

Drawing the world…

Scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan, 0 to reset. Routes are the usual lanes, not ship tracks; links by air, rail and road are drawn as curves.

Reading the map

The oldest strategic chain: crude and LNG from the Gulf, Russia and the United States, carried through a handful of straits to Asia and Europe.
Designed in the United States, made on Dutch and Japanese machines in Taiwan and South Korea, packaged and assembled in China and Southeast Asia — from inputs China controls.
Mined in the Congo, Chile, Australia, Indonesia and Myanmar; refined almost entirely in China; turned into batteries and magnets that go to the world.
The container trade: factories in China and East Asia to shops in Europe and North America, through the busiest ports and the most contested canals.
A few exporters — the Black Sea, the Americas, Canada — feed a world of importers in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Two continents dig it, one country buys it: Australia and Brazil load the ore that China turns into more than half of the world’s steel.

Figures are rounded from the sources listed below the map. Routes are schematic. Numbered rings are the chokepoints: places where a large share of a chain squeezes through one narrow passage or one country.

The nine chokepoints

Where the chains narrow. A closure, an attack or a rule made by the coastal state is felt in every chain that passes.

#	Coast	What passes	Chains
1	Iran, Oman, UAE ☪	About 20 million barrels of oil a day — roughly a fifth of world oil consumption — and about a fifth of the world’s LNG (EIA, 2024). About 80% of the crude goes to Asia.	Oil & gas
2	Yemen, Djibouti, Eritrea ☪	About 9 million barrels of oil a day in 2023; flows fell by about half in early 2024 as tankers avoided it (EIA). It is the southern gate of the Red Sea and Suez route.	Oil & gas, Critical minerals & batteries, Manufactured goods, Grain, oilseeds & fertiliser
3	Egypt ☪	About 12% of world trade and roughly 30% of container traffic before 2023 (UNCTAD). Egypt’s toll revenue fell sharply when ships turned away.	Oil & gas, Critical minerals & batteries, Manufactured goods, Grain, oilseeds & fertiliser
4	Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore ☪	About 23 million barrels of oil a day in 2023, the busiest oil chokepoint in the world by volume; it joins the Indian and Pacific oceans (EIA).	Oil & gas, Critical minerals & batteries, Manufactured goods
5	China, Taiwan	Nearly half of the world’s container fleet passed through in 2022 (Bloomberg shipping data). On the island itself: about 90% of the most advanced chips.	Oil & gas, Semiconductors, Critical minerals & batteries, Manufactured goods
6	Panama	About 5% of world maritime trade and about 40% of US container traffic (Panama Canal Authority).	Manufactured goods, Grain, oilseeds & fertiliser
7	Turkey ☪	The only way out of the Black Sea: Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian and Kazakh grain and oil, about 3 million barrels of oil a day (EIA).	Oil & gas, Grain, oilseeds & fertiliser
8	Spain, Morocco, Gibraltar (UK)	Roughly 100,000 ships a year: the gate between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and the last chokepoint on the Suez route to northern Europe.	Oil & gas, Critical minerals & batteries, Manufactured goods
9	South Africa	Not a chokepoint but the pressure valve for the others: the fallback when Suez or the Red Sea is closed, and the only way for ships too big for either canal.	Oil & gas, Manufactured goods, Grain, oilseeds & fertiliser, Iron ore & steel

☪ Muslim-majority coast.

Sources

US Energy Information Administration (EIA): World Oil Transit Chokepoints, 2024–25.
UNCTAD: Review of Maritime Transport; Suez Canal Authority.
US Geological Survey: Mineral Commodity Summaries 2024–25. IEA: Global Critical Minerals Outlook.
FAO and USDA: grain, oilseed and fertiliser trade statistics.
worldsteel; Panama Canal Authority; Bloomberg shipping data.