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DAVAO
CITY—The Sasa Wharf here, on an expansion program, is the
country’s foreign container hub outside the Metro Manila
seaports, handling more direct container traffic during
the last decade.
In the
last two years alone, foreign containerized cargo surged
by 36.8 percent here, which more than compensated for the
slight dip in revenue on domestic shipping cargo.
The
Philippine Ports Authority (PPA) here said initial records
show that the Davao port’s foreign container traffic rose
to 182,564 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) in 2007 from
the previous year’s 133,367 TEUs.
A BUSY day at Sasa Wharf,
where direct container traffic has risen the past decade.
-- MANUEL
CAYON
In the
initial 2007 report issued by the Port Management Office (PMO)-Davao,
the combined domestic and foreign trade at the port here
also posted a 3.8-percent increase amounting to 3.2
million metric tons compared with its 2006 performance in
terms of total cargo volume. Of that volume, almost half,
or 49.6 percent, was attributed to foreign cargoes both
for import and export.
Import and
export cargo grew by 7.55 percent during the year.
Container
traffic is measured in TEUs, referring to the 20-footer
container vans used in cargo handling.
Foreign
trade performance in the ports refers to the level of
import and export cargo volume or throughput measured in
metric tons.
The
domestic container traffic at the Davao port, however,
dipped by 7.8 percent in 2007, largely due to the change
in consolidating, or handling, foreign cargo. Previously,
local shippers would handle the shipment of cargoes for
consolidation to bigger ships before leaving the Manila
International Container Terminal, the
South Harbor
or North Harbor of Metro Manila for foreign destinations.
In the
process of consolidating or handling the cargo, the
recording would classify the shipment as domestically
carried, not foreign.
“The
implication of this figure [a dip in domestic revenues]
deserves a second look at the trend of the operations of
the transshipment of containerized cargoes, meaning those
which are loaded from domestic ports either through
chartered or passenger vessels prior to being consolidated
in a larger foreign-bound vessel in other ports such as
Manila,” said the PMO-Davao report.
For
instance, it said, “As the volume of containerized bananas
transshipped to Manila for final foreign destination has
been decreasing for the last three years since more ships
are now loading cargoes in Sasa Wharf to direct to foreign
markets, the loss in the domestic front is a gain in the
foreign TEUs, causing the 36.8-percent upsurge in the
latter.”
“Prior to
the activation of direct routes of shipping lines in Davao
like Southship, Jardine, RCL and Marianas, apart from the
existing APL and Maersk, total domestic transit volume
from 2004 to 2006 has been well within the
100,000-metric-ton mark,” the PMO-Davao said.
With
Davao’s increasing direct foreign shipping, it has become
the country’s foreign terminal hub outside of the three
ports in Metro Manila, the PMO-Davao said. Singapore leads
the countries with more port of calls here, followed by
Kaoshiung,
China.
“This
positive development runs parallel to the increasing
containerization trend in handling cargoes in more
developed economies worldwide, giving way to greater
productivity, faster turnaround time of ships at the ports
and better trade movement opportunities,” the PMO-Davao
said.
“These
updates keep us on our toes in terms of infrastructure
responsiveness as well as keeping our clients satisfied
with the quality of our services,” the PPA’s Port District
Office-Southern Mindanao manager Abdussabor Sawadjaan told
a recently concluded district conference in Davao City,
according to the PMO-Davao.
The
PMO-Davao statement said that Sawadjaan has asked the
government to install at the
Sasa Wharf a mobile
harbor crane, following a clamor from its cargo-handling
operators, the Davao International Port and Stevedoring
Services Corp. and the Filipinas Port Services. The groups
made the request in their respective cargo-handling
service contracts with the PPA.
The Davao
port continued to rely, though, on the slower on-deck
cranes of vessels or the land-based reach stacker, instead
of the more flexible and larger mobile cranes. The slower
cranes, according to the PMO-Davao, “greatly affect labor
productivity, causing longer turnaround time for vessels
in the port, which increases shipping cost, and can often
be the cause of demurrage claims of ships being delayed en
route to other ports of call.”
The
PMO-Davao said that “as compared with more advanced ports
in neighboring Asian countries such as Malaysia,
Singapore, China and Hong Kong, which are well-equipped in
terms of container handling, countryside or regional
gateways in the SoMin [Southern Mindanao] District such as
Davao and General Santos stand disadvantaged in the
apparent absence of more efficient cranes to handle fully
containerized vessels.”
Sawadjaan
said the newly constructed modern Mindanao Container
Terminal in Tagoloan, Misamis Oriental, in
Northern Mindanao “with gantry cranes to boot is developing rapidly as more
direct routes to and from international destinations [are]
run by American President Lines and Maersk.” | 
