DAVAO CITY—By May, Sulawesi is just a boat ride away. This is made possible with the launch of the first intercountry roll-on, roll-off (Roro) shipping route, an attempt to break the long lull in the connectivity issue in East Asia that has hounded for three decades this poorer side of the Asian grouping.
At the end of the month, Philippine and Indonesian authorities would launch the Philippine side of the two-country cargo shipping.
The cargo shipping is a Philippine initiative to connect this city with General Santos City in the Southern Mindanao island, and with Bitung City in northern Sulawesi district of Indonesia, using the barge concept in moving cargo and businessmen.
The shipping is being mounted by Cebu City-based Asian Marine Transport Corp., with a 7,000-tonnage ferry with a capacity of 100 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs). The ferry has a top speed of 13.5 knots.
While the two countries are traditional trading partners using two known jump-off points: through their respective capitals and through the infamous, largely unregulated and porous southern backdoor of the Philippines, referring to the southwestern island provinces of Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi, which age-old documentations point to former land bridges.
Ambitious project
THE Roro cargo shipping promised to drastically cut shipping time and consequently, the cost, of travel currently between three weeks and five weeks—through the Manila-Jakarta air route and, via land, to Bitung market. Authorities have said the Roro level would lead to only one and one half-day, or 36 hours, of travel.
This shipping is the biggest sea connectivity venture within the Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines-East Asean Growth Area, or Bimp-Eaga.
The launching would be on April 30. The fate of this ambitious project—its sustainability, and patronage by business groups in the two countries—would be a crucial issue, though, as what befell the previous air links between them.
Vision 2025
LINKING the regions of each of the four countries has been one of four dreams of the founding leaders of the BIMP-Eaga in 1994.
Other than strong linkage, the countries also sought to turn into an advantageous trading position the negative perception on having common food-basket products, increasing movement of people and enlivening tourism, and crafting a practical and sustainable use of its strength: environmental health.
But connectivity finds a more priority seat among its leaders, for obvious reasons. The regions committed by their nations’ leaders to form the Eaga are archipelagic and considered only as satellites and production areas to their nation’s capitals. Mindanao and Palawan are the Philippines’s link to the BIMP-Eaga, as with the entire sultanate of Brunei Darussalam, the 10 provinces in the Indonesian islands of Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Maluku and Irian Jaya, and Sabah, Sarawak and Labuan of Malaysia.
The subregion’s land area is roughly 1.54 million square kilometers and is home to about 45.6 million people, based on a 1996 survey.
Being backwater regions were the biggest hurdles then. The most ambitious initiative was to turn these poor regions into productive areas and solve, at the same time, the long episodes of political conflict also hounding many underdeveloped areas.
It would be understandable then, that the bulk of the activities of the next-generation development program called BIMP-Eaga Vision 2025 would find big-ticket public funding on transportation infrastructure.
The BIMP-Eaga Vision 2025 is the successor plan to the Implementation Blueprint 2012-2016. The former is touted to be also another—but also bolder and better armed—long-term framework development plan for the East Asia region.
Previous development plans have their own early infantile growth pains and adult bumps. These include periodic political dynamics in their respective nation’s domestic affairs, crisis on their respective agriculture sector like the Avian flu and drought, and global economic issues, such as the Asian financial meltdown in 1997 and a global recession in 2008.
For quite a longer time—discussions and debate spanned a decade, the four nations dabbled and contended with finding common ground on customs, immigration, quarantine and security of their borders. Ministers and Cabinet secretaries have to negotiate and persuade their nation’s leaders and lawmakers to accommodate certain perks on travel and cargo to their poor regions, or relax some regulations if only to inject attraction to these areas.
The lack of market attraction of some destinations also kept the region from progressing further.
Well-oiled
TRADE Assistant Secretary Arturo P. Boncato Jr. said the development blueprint between now and 2025 has been well-oiled compared to its predecessor development plans.
“The proposed infrastructure priorities funded by respective governments in the Eaga is now $31 billion, the highest so far,” Boncato told the BusinessMirror. The previous recorded government-funded project was $1 billion. According to Boncato, designated senior Philippine government official to the BIMP-Eaga, the Roro cargo shipping is not included “because it’s an activity of the private sector”.
He said data capture and database tracking of non-governmental activities in the BIMP-Eaga is being pursued this year, an initiative of the Philippine chairmanship of the BIMP-Eaga. “We need to track these important economic activities, as well,” he added.
The big-ticket projects include the ongoing Internet cable interconnection, running a submarine cable connecting Brunei and the three other countries to as far as Guam.
Best project
IT was last year that the submarine cable project was announced by Romeo Montenegro of the Mindanao Development Authority (MinDA).
Montenegro, chief of the MinDA public investments, international promotion and public affairs, explained the project was developed by a consortium of Chinese, Malaysian and Brunei firms. It was through the consortium that the submarine cables connecting Brunei with East Kalimantan of Indonesia were installed.
Montenegro said the project, known as the BIMP-Eaga Submarine and Terrestrial (Best) cable project, was initiated by the information and communication technology sector of the BIMP-Eaga group in 2014.
He expressed optimism the project will pressure the two Philippine telecommunication firms to upgrade their facilities “and finally serve [the] population with a fast and reliable broadband speed, currently the slowest in Asia.”
On the Philippine side, Boncato said the Mindanao Railway is the biggest infrastructure project within the BIMP-Eaga. The project feasibility would be started for the Tagum-Davao del Norte passing through Davao City and to Digos City, Davao del Sur, section of a supposed Mindanao loop of the railway line.
To be continued