Mozambique Channel

The Mozambique Channel is the unusual entry on any list of chokepoints, because it is not narrow. It is a broad arm of the Indian Ocean, some 1,600 kilometres long and around 400 wide at its tightest — hardly a strait at all. Yet it functions as a strategic passage for the same reason the Cape of Good Hope does: it is the deep-water road that the largest ships must take when the Suez Canal cannot hold them, and a corridor whose surrounding islands give a handful of powers — France above all — outsized reach over the western Indian Ocean. A vast offshore gas discovery, a jihadist insurgency, and the rerouting forced by the Red Sea crisis have together turned this once-sleepy channel into one of Africa’s emerging hotspots.

Geographic Position¶

The channel separates Mozambique on the African mainland from the island of Madagascar to the east, running roughly northeast to southwest. Scattered through and around it lie territories that punch far above their size: the Comoros archipelago and Mayotte — a French overseas department at the channel’s northern mouth, claimed by Comoros — together with the French-administered Scattered Islands (Bassas da India, Europa, the Gloriosos, Juan de Nova), uninhabited specks that nonetheless give France an exclusive economic zone of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. France’s principal regional base, Réunion, lies just to the east. Through these holdings, a European power maintains a permanent strategic presence in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

The Supertanker’s Road¶

The channel’s commercial role is to carry what Suez cannot. The largest crude carriers — the VLCCs and ULCCs too big for the Suez Canal — sail from the Gulf around the Cape of Good Hope to reach Europe and the Americas, and many of them pass through the Mozambique Channel on the way. It is widely described as carrying something like 30 percent of the world’s tanker traffic, a striking figure that deserves a caveat: it traces back to a UN environmental report cited at second hand, not to traffic-monitoring data, and is best treated as a legacy order-of-magnitude estimate of the channel’s importance rather than a verified current measurement. What is not in doubt is that the channel is a major artery for the deepest-draft energy shipping, and that its significance rises whenever the shorter Red Sea route is closed.

That is precisely what has happened. The Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping from late 2023 pushed an enormous volume of traffic around the Cape — by the EIA’s figures, oil rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope rose to around 9 million barrels a day in 2024, while flows through Bab el-Mandeb roughly halved. Much of that diverted tonnage runs up the Mozambique Channel. A crisis at one end of the Indian Ocean has thus made a passage at the other busier than it has been in decades.

Gas, Insurgency, and the Palma Attack¶

The channel’s second story is energy of its own. Northern Mozambique’s offshore Rovuma Basin holds an estimated 100 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — one of the largest discoveries of the century — and anchors a planned investment of tens of billions of dollars, led by TotalEnergies’ Mozambique LNG project on the Afungi peninsula in Cabo Delgado province. For Mozambique, one of the world’s poorest countries, it promised transformation.

It also collided with a war. Since 2017 an Islamic State–affiliated insurgency — known locally as al-Shabab, though unconnected to the Somali group of that name — has ravaged Cabo Delgado, killing thousands and displacing hundreds of thousands. In March 2021 the insurgents overran the town of Palma, beside the LNG site, in a days-long assault that killed dozens; TotalEnergies declared force majeure and suspended the project. Rwandan troops and a regional Southern African force subsequently clawed back control of much of the province, and in early 2026 TotalEnergies lifted its force majeure and announced a full restart, with first gas now expected toward the end of the decade. The episode is a parable of the resource curse in real time: a discovery vast enough to remake a nation, held hostage by an insurgency the state could not contain alone.

A Crowded Sea¶

The third story is competition. The Mozambique Channel is re-emerging as an arena of great-power and middle-power jostling. France is the resident power, projecting force from Mayotte and Réunion and guarding its scattered-island EEZ with a standing regional deployment of warships and aircraft. India, extending its reach as a self-styled net security provider in the Indian Ocean, runs maritime-patrol flights through the channel in cooperation with France and is building facilities on Mauritius’ Agalega island near the northern approaches. China, a massive investor in Mozambican infrastructure and the operator of a naval base up the coast at Djibouti, looms as the longer-term competitor. And the spectre of Somali piracy, which at its peak reached as far south as these waters, has not entirely lifted.

The channel also carries an unresolved tangle of sovereignty disputes — Comoros’ claim to Mayotte, Madagascar’s claim to the Scattered Islands — that give the resident French presence a contested edge and ensure the western Indian Ocean will remain politically live.

Piracy’s Long Shadow¶

The Mozambique Channel sits at the far southern edge of a threat that has haunted the western Indian Ocean for two decades: Somali piracy. At its peak around 2011, Somali piracy ranged astonishingly far from its home waters, with attacks recorded as far south as the approaches to the channel — off Tanzania, the Comoros, and Madagascar — the furthest the pirates ever reached. That a maritime-crime wave originating in a collapsed state on the Horn of Africa could threaten shipping more than 2,000 nautical miles away was a lesson in how piracy follows opportunity, not geography, and it drew regional navies into the channel’s defence.

The threat never fully disappeared, and it has shown signs of revival. The collapse of international naval vigilance, combined with renewed instability ashore, allowed a resurgence of Somali piracy in 2024, including the seizure of a bulk carrier sailing from Mozambique — a reminder that the conditions which produced the original crisis, state weakness and ungoverned coastline, persist. The channel’s combination of heavy, valuable tanker traffic and weak littoral states makes it a natural hunting ground if the deterrent presence thins.

Layered on top is the channel’s own home-grown insecurity: the Cabo Delgado insurgency ashore, the contested sovereignty of the French islands, and the spillover risk from a wider Indian Ocean that is becoming more militarised by the year. The result is a waterway where commercial shipping, offshore energy infrastructure, jihadist insurgency, piracy, and great-power naval competition all overlap — a concentration of risk unusual even by the standards of the world’s strategic passages. It is precisely this layering that has drawn France, India, and others to police the channel more actively, each for its own mix of commercial and strategic reasons.

Strategic Assessment¶

The Mozambique Channel breaks the usual chokepoint mould: it is wide, not narrow, and its control rests not on a few kilometres of water but on the ring of islands around it. Its strategic value comes from three things converging — its role as the deep-water Cape route for the biggest ships, its vast offshore gas, and its position as a stage for French, Indian, and Chinese competition in an ocean that is becoming central to global rivalry. The Red Sea crisis has underlined the first, the LNG restart the second, and the steady militarisation of the region the third.

Conclusion¶

A broad reach of ocean that few outside the shipping and energy worlds could place on a map has quietly become one of the more consequential waterways of the era. The Mozambique Channel carries the supertankers that Suez turns away, sits atop a continent-changing gas field guarded against insurgents, and draws the navies of France, India, and China toward a contest for the western Indian Ocean. It is the chokepoint that is not a strait — significant not because it is narrow, but because of what passes through it, what lies beneath it, and who is gathering around its edges.

Sources & Further Reading¶

• “The Mozambique Channel is the next security hotspot” by David Brewster (Lowy Institute) — the essay that framed the channel’s strategic revival (and the source of the much-cited tanker-traffic figure).

• TotalEnergies, “Mozambique LNG announces the full restart of all its activities” — the 2026 restart of the suspended gas megaproject.

• “Terrorism takes its toll on Mozambique’s gas revenue” (Institute for Security Studies, Africa) — on the Cabo Delgado insurgency and the Palma attack.

• “Red Sea Shipping Crisis: Oil Flows Through Bab el-Mandeb Plummet” (gCaptain, citing the US EIA) — the rerouting that has boosted the Cape and the channel.