Ecuador closes the first quarter of 2026 caught in a strategic vice that export volume figures alone cannot explain.

On one hand, January’s export numbers are the strongest in years for several sectors: shrimp up 22.2%, bananas up 17.4%, mining concentrates doubled. On the other, the environment through which those exports must move has fundamentally changed in nature. What was until February a cost crisis — surcharges, freight rates, tariffs — has become something qualitatively different: an operational survival crisis, where the rules of the game are being rewritten while cargo is still in transit.

The war in the Strait of Hormuz is not a logistics event. It is a systemic disruption that chains energy, fertilizers, freight, agricultural prices, and global inflation into a single movement. The regulatory aggression from the U.S. — signing a trade agreement with Ecuador with one hand while opening a forced labor investigation with the other — is not a contradiction: it is a signal of how Washington uses trade as a foreign policy instrument in real time.

The Ecuadorian CEO who keeps managing logistics is answering the wrong question. The right question for this quarter is different: how much exposure does my company have to events no one can predict, and how much time do I have to reduce it before the cost decides for me?