BSI's Global Supply Chain Intelligence Report said cargo theft was named as the main concern for the Americas, with Rio de Janeiro seeing the most dramatic increase in the phenomenon.

Rio reported 9,870 cargo theft incidents in 2016, up 36 percent on 2015. Given that Brazil is taking minimal steps to curb the rate of theft, the analysis suggests Brazil could see another year of increased cargo theft in 2017.

An increasingly high rate of cargo theft has also plagued freight shippers in Germany — with thieves often slashing into the tarpaulins of trailers to steal cargo.

The widespread use of soft-sided trailers in Europe has made this type of theft increasingly common, the report noted.

Meanwhile, terrorist attacks in Nice in July and Berlin in December, along with dozens of counter terrorism arrests across Europe in 2016, posed another kind of supply chain risk. “Those attacks in particular also underscored the threat that terrorists will exploit the supply chain to perpetrate attacks. In both cases, Tunisian men linked to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) used cargo trucks to ram into crowds of civilians,” said the report.

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