France has launched a new international network linking some of the world's busiest ports in a coordinated effort to choke off the global drug trade, formally unveiling the initiative on Monday as foreign ministers from the Group of Seven gathered in Paris.
The G7+ Ports Network to Combat Drug Trafficking brings together the seven G7 nations — Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States — alongside Brazil and South Korea, major international ports, and organisations including Interpol, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the International Maritime Organization and the World Customs Organization.
The network covers 14 ports and is designed to improve intelligence sharing and coordination against narcotics trafficking routes, targeting the entire supply chain from the countries where drugs are produced, through transit points, to their final destinations. Its first meeting is being held in Marseille, France's largest port, while the G7 foreign ministers meet at the Quai d'Orsay in Paris on 9 and 10 November.
Announcing the launch at a press conference, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said the international dimension would strengthen work already under way at home. "Through this international dimension, we can bolster the substantial efforts already being led by the Ministry of the Interior — and other relevant ministries — to tackle a problem that inflicts such deep harm upon our society," he said.
The focus on ports reflects a blunt reality acknowledged in the G7 leaders' own declaration: maritime transport is the primary route for global drug and precursor chemical trafficking. Barrot has said that around 70 per cent of the drugs entering France arrive through its ports, a figure he has cited repeatedly as the reason the crackdown must start at the quayside rather than only on the streets.
The idea is not new. G7 leaders agreed at their summit in Évian in June 2026 to create the network, and their declaration of 17 June committed them to reinforce cooperation between G7 members and their partners' main maritime ports, in coordination with the European Ports Alliance and the European Coalition Against Drugs. Ministers were tasked with having the network up and running by November 2026 — a deadline the Paris launch now meets.
France says the network will use new tools, including artificial intelligence, to track cargoes and connect ports more closely, so that a suspicious container can be followed from its port of departure to its port of arrival. Barrot told French broadcasters ahead of the launch that every cargo has a departure port and an arrival port, and that coordinating the ports is how the problem can be contained.
The launch also builds on a flurry of French diplomacy on the issue. A French government document said Paris had concluded more than 20 bilateral cooperation agreements on narcotics trafficking since late 2025, and the network will sit alongside a planned inventory of G7 initiatives and best practices for countering drug and precursor trafficking in ports.
Beyond the ports themselves, G7 leaders have tasked their ministers with developing, also by November 2026, a comprehensive action plan against the infiltration of legitimate public and private institutions by drug trafficking networks and organised criminal groups — a recognition that traffickers increasingly exploit lawful businesses, ports and logistics chains to move their product.
For Europe, the initiative lands at a moment of mounting concern over cocaine flows. The European Commission launched its own European Ports Alliance in Antwerp in January 2024, bringing together 16 container ports including Rotterdam, Hamburg, Algeciras and Marseille, after record seizures of cocaine in European ports. The new G7+ network is intended to extend that cooperation worldwide, linking European ports with counterparts in the Americas and Asia.
What happens next will depend on how quickly the 14 ports begin sharing information in practice. The network's members have promised joint field visits to port authorities and law enforcement agencies, closer work with the private sector, and stronger port and shipping security standards. If the intelligence sharing works as intended, customs and police in one port could flag a suspect shipment long before it reaches its destination — turning the world's ports from a traffickers' highway into a coordinated net.
