Gov’t urged to focus on decongesting Manila port

Government agencies and the private sector were urged to focus on resolving the continued congestion at the Port of Manila, and no longer dwell on the impact of the truck ban.

“The problem is no longer the truck ban. It’s now about speeding up the decongestion (activities) at the port,” said Sergio R. Ortiz-Luis Jr., president of the Philippine Exporters Confederation Inc. (Philexport) and honorary chair of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI).

“I think we have passed the issue of the truck ban since the express lanes were opened. The problem now is you can’t move inside the pier, even if officials have said that the capacity utilization at the Manila port has improved from 110 percent to 89 percent. The target is 70 percent,” he added.

Ortiz-Luis explained that the city government of Manila was only right to impose a truck ban because nobody was moving to curb the growing number of trucking companies that do not have their own garage and have made the roads their parking areas.

He pointed out that operations at the port had started to normalize even with the truck ban in place. There are, he added, thousands of truckers plying in and out of Metro Manila, of whom about 40 percent do not even have licenses.

Government data showed that there are about 30,000 trucks plying Metro Manila, 11,150 of which reportedly do business at the ports.

“You don’t need that many trucks,” he added.

The problem now is at the port, where many empty containers are stored, along with the loaded ones that have problems with the Bureau of Customs (BOC).

Ortiz-Luis said the solution was to simply ship those excess containers by barges to other container yards in Subic and Clark, and even to industrial estates and economic zones that have started to open their respective yards.

Although this is already being done, Ortiz-Luis said the movement was too slow.

The Philippine Ports Authority earlier reported that the overflow of 57,000 containers has gone down to only 28,000 containers over the past two and a half months.

Another issue that should be resolved, Ortiz-Luis added, is that most major shipping lines do not have their own container yards in the country. The government, he added, must reinstate such policy as a measure against port congestion.

“All the major shipping lines used to have container yards, but they found it cheaper to just pay the fees for the overstaying containers than to put up a yard,” he added.

The congestion at the port was earlier blamed on Manila’s expanded truck ban policy, which bans eight wheelers and vehicles with a gross weight of above 4,500 kilos from plying the city’s streets between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m.

As a result, local companies have reeled from a double whammy of double-digit losses in revenue and equally crippling surges in import and export related expenses since last February.