A Global Retreat As Economies Dry Up
As World Trade Plummets, Bustling Ports Stand Idle And Foreign Workers Track Back Home
Singapore - This shimmering city-state was the house globalization built. When world trade boomed, Singapore’s seaport at the crossroads of East and West became the Chicago O’Hare of freighters and supertankers. Singapore Airlines took off despite serving a country with no domestic air routes. Nearly everything manufactured here is made for export. One out of every three workers is a foreigner.
But as the world enters a period of deglobalization, Singapore is a window into the reversal of the forces that brought unprecedented global mobility to goods, services, investment and labor. With world trade plummeting for the first time since 1982, the long-bustling port has become a maritime parking lot in recent weeks, with rows of idled freighters from Asia, Europe, the United States, South America, Africa and the Middle East stretching for miles along the coast. “We’re running out of space to park them,” said Ron Widdows, chief executive of Singapore-based NOL, one of the world’s largest container lines.
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