Conclusion
DAVAO CITY—The Davao City Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DCCCI) said it renewed the bid to create the airport authority following its preparation for the fourth Investment Conference, the chamber’s own initiative to allow foreign investors a local business panorama of the prospects of their money when invested here.
“Now, we would rely on you, the media, to drum up the advocacy,” said Antonio de la Cruz, a former chamber president.
Arturo Milan, the Mindanao adviser for Aboitiz Equity Ventures and a trustee of the chamber, said the airport authority would have maximized the current global spotlight trained on Davao City as the hometown of President Duterte.
“We only have less than five years to take this opportunity to attract investors into this city and the rest of Mindanao,” he added.
The chamber has also acknowledged the aggressive working visits abroad of the President. Likewise, DCCCI also recognized Duterte’s reconnection with mainland China and a historic visit to Russia, albeit cut short by the terror attack in the Central Mindanao interior city of Marawi.
Proponents of the airport-authority advocacy, however, would not mind while the proposal lingers in Congress, this city and the rest of Mindanao are getting the infrastructure attention it longs for all these decades.
The President’s visits yielded results for this dream, which started three decades of lobbying for even a third of the national budget, and currently drawing in multimillion dollar financing to infrastructure-starved Mindanao.
‘Build, build, build’
THE European Chamber of Commerce in the Philippines (ECCP) web site quoted a City Information Office dispatch, stating that Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang had said “Beijing was willing to fund the P40-billion Davao City International Airport Development Project.”
The same commitment was made on the proposed P218-billion 830-kilometer Mindanao Railway Project.
Further, the ECCP cited Ma. Lourdes Lim, the director of the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda), as confirming the commitment, adding that the project includes the construction of a parallel taxiway and the expansion of the passenger-terminal areas.
Lim also confirmed that Wang had pledged to send in a team that would study the Mindanao Railway Project and other proposed infrastructure projects to be undertaken in Mindanao.
Under the proposal, the first phase of the railway project will connect the Davao cities of Tagum in Davao del Norte, Davao City, and Digos in Davao del Sur.
Under the government’s most aggressive multitrillion-peso infrastructure spending, Mindanao’s two major airports in Davao City and Laguindingan, Misamis Oriental, and the railway project were included, along with three other projects.
The Laguindingan and Davao airports are among the 25 airports in Mindanao, many of them awaiting improvement or further multipurpose use to be improved from their occasional utilization as airstrips for agriculture and forestry use.
According to Katherine Zenith Gel-dore, technical staff of the Mindanao Development Authority (MinDA) research and planning division, the two airports were included in the national government’s “Build, Build, Build” program.
The other projects include the Panguil Bay Bridge, to connect Lanao del Norte with the Misamis Occidental and the rest of the Zamboanga Peninsula, and which is currently being serviced by a barge. Projects also include the Davao expressway system and the flood control project in Ambal-Simuay, which is part of the larger Mindanao River Basin.
Aside from these “Build, Build, Build” projects, the MinDA would also lobby for inclusion of what are called “additional catalytic projects” that include transferring of the Zamboanga International Airport to another location with expansion capability (P9.87 billion).
Other additional catalytic projects include the Mindanao River Basin Flood Control Project (P9.5 billion) to address the perennial flooding in Cotabato City and the rest of Central Mindanao and the Polloc Freeport Development (P1.8 billion) to significantly reduce transport cost of products and spur economic activities in the South Central Mindanao Development Corridor.
Shepherding development
THE DCCCI said the infrastructure development across Mindanao is a fruit worth seeing ripening as optimism continues to run high on the potential of the country’s largest island group.
The airport authority may have been a bright opportunity to do it but for areas around the Davao region.
But the chamber would look at its approval as, indeed, a faster way to shepherd global attention and actual investment in Davao City, and to the rest of Mindanao.
The opportunity has presented itself immediately even as Duterte was awaiting his oath of office. When before the Davao region would get only an average of P8 billion to P12 billion in actual investments, from investment leads of P30 billion, the Board of Investment has recorded as much as P800 billion in investment leads.
The airport authority may wait. But the business and tourism community agreed that the infrastructure development across most of Mindanao should now be pursued “while the iron is hot”, so the cliché goes.
Image credits: Nonie Reyes