2026 Breakbulk and Project Cargo Conference Breakbulk & Project Cargo
Risk adjustments
Geopolitical volatility clouds otherwise sunny project cargo outlook
By Carly Fields, Eric Johnson and Mark Szakonyi
The outlook for project cargo volumes is generally strong, but stakeholders are being buffeted by a growing list of headwinds— some new, some old— that require near-constant adjustments to their supply chain strategies, according to panelists at the Journal of Commerce’ s Breakbulk and Project Cargo Conference 2026.
Luke Mace, senior VP at global forwarder GEODIS Project Logistics, identified three distinct“ buckets of risk” keeping project owners and logistics providers awake at night: people, established risks and newer disruptions.
“ No matter what we discuss today, the biggest risk to your organization will always be people. Let’ s not forget that through everything else,” he said.“ The second bucket is the more established risks, the ones that we’ ve learned through decades of experience.”
Mace said forwarders create tools to help measure what they believe“ could” happen on any given project to identify an acceptable level of risk.“ And that could be anything from foreign exchange losses to compliance issues and equipment availability.”
But the third category, newer, typically external disruptions, has injected a level of uncertainty into supply chains that no one could have predicted, Mace said.
“ Right now, that is the Middle East conflict, but that’ s just the most recent,” he said.“ You have had everything from the Baltimore bridge to Ukraine to COVID to union strikes... there are so many risks that are not about moving cargo.”
Although the US and Iran appear to be angling toward deescalation, there’ s little chance that the situation in the Strait of Hormuz will normalize this year, according to José Enrique Sevilla-Macip, a senior research analyst at S & P Global, parent company of the Journal of Commerce. S & P Global expects crude oil prices to fall to about $ 70 per barrel by the end of the year after peaking at around $ 118 per barrel in the second quarter due to the closure of the strait to commercial vessel traffic.
“ There are so many risks that are not about moving cargo.”
What’ s more, the threat of similar disruptions in the region has become“ permanent,” Sevilla-Macip said.
“ Iran will maintain the capacity to, at any point in time, resume its attacks on shipping or against critical infrastructure in the Gulf space,” he said.“[ And ] we all know what that means.”
Noting that the Middle East is hardly the only region ripe for continued disruption, Sevilla-Macip said geopolitical conflicts disrupting shipping operations will be the norm for the rest of the decade. The Ukraine-Russia war, for example, is expected to last at least another year, said Sevilla-Macip, who also pointed to increased tension in recent months between the US and Cuba, and between China and Taiwan.
10 Journal of Commerce | June 2026 www. joc. com