Back and port

A few weeks ago, Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio ditched a project of this huge company, Mega Harbour.

Her father, the motorbiking Duterte Harley, when he was still the mayor, personally signed the joint venture agreement between the city and the company to do the project worth P40 billion.

That did not seem to matter to Mayor Sara, and neither did the court case that Mega Harbour threatened to file against her and the city government.

She just said in media statements she would answer them “in the proper forum,” although for its part, Mega Harbour must really be torn over any legal action, despite its claim that the cancellation was “unilateral and arbitrary.”

Truly, it would have to protect its interests by filing the case, having already spent more than P300 million on the venture.

But the court case would merely delay the whole thing—for years and years.

The delay would be bad for everybody—definitely bad for the informal settlers (some 4,000 families) that would get free houses under the JVA.

By the way, the groups behind Mega Harbour are Harbour Centre (operator of the bulk port in Manila) and Manila North Harbour (biggest domestic port), which Petron owns up to 35 percent which, in turn, San Miguel majority owns.

Obviously they are not your seedy fly-by-night bunch of carpetbaggers.

Anyway, under Duterte Harley, the city government came up with the development master plan for the city, including the redevelopment of the 2.5-kilometer coastline—an eyesore of an area in its blight and squalor.

Almost three years ago in October 2014, Mega Harbour submitted an unsolicited proposal to the city government to redevelop the coast through a 200-hectare reclamation.

The JVA thus came about, aiming to develop the area as Mindanao’s logistics and post-harvest center in the next 10 years.

Duterte Harley approved the JVA in June 2016, but after a few months, Mayor Sara announced she wanted an increase in the share of the city in the project.

It would mean an additional cost of almost P2 billion to Mega Harbour, and still the company had agreed to meet her demand.

Last month, all of a sudden, she went back and forth, and then forth and back, to announce she would instead terminate the JVA.

Mega Harbour learned about the decision in media.

Part of the statement of Mayor Sara read: “The decision came after about more that a year of careful review and study of the available documents and after weighing out the intentions of the project against its commercial viability, legal and social implications, and the project’s possible effects to the environment.”

There—the all too familiar “environment” issue again!

Still, the mayor did not delve into the “environment” issue in her media statement.

From what I gathered, however, Mega Harbour already submitted volumes upon volumes of “environmental impact studies” to the DENR. The city government could have easily obtained copies of those.

But just exactly what its “environment” issues were remained a mystery to Mega Harbour executives, including its funding banks and stockholders, and even future users of the port.

Were they based on scientific studies? Or were they merely fanned by your usual fear mongers about environment armageddon?

The country with the biggest reclaimed land in the world is China with 1.2 million hectares (has), which should include the reclamation in Hong Kong and Macau, not to mention the West Philippine Sea.

Anyway, the Netherlands has 700,000 has.; South Korea, 150,000 has.; Japan, 28,500 has.; and Singapore, 13,500 has.

Most of those countries are not exactly what we may call environmental disasters.

And they enjoyed the economic benefits of reclamation.

It was precisely what Duterte Harley had in mind when he signed the JVA.

Between us girls, Duterte himself even chose the site of the project.