DoTC to prioritize dev’t of bigger ports

MANILA, Philippines—The Aquino administration may seek the closure of small, inefficient and redundant ports across the country to allow the government to divert its meager resources to develop more strategically located facilities.

The Department of Transportation and Communications (DoTC) said it was coordinating with other agencies to identify the country’s key ports to be developed.

“The construction of ports in this country is very politicized. That’s a truth,” Transportation Secretary Mar Roxas said. He noted that the local governments of nearly every province near the sea have taken it upon themselves to build port facilities.

“Our port situation is similar to our airport situation. Every province wants its own port,” he said. “The result is that the number of facilities we have in existence is greater than what we need to move cargo efficiently,” he said.

“Historically, over the last seven decades, requests for these ports have been granted. You have zero economies of scale. There are no large ports and silos and container yards,” he said.

“Even the largest ones—Davao, Cagayan de Oro, Phividec—are small relative

to what could have been. So if you have small ports, you have small cargoes, therefore you have small ships, hence an inefficient transport system,” Roxas added.

He said the country has too many small ports that when put together would be very expensive to maintain and yet unable to handle large amounts of cargo.

“That is why it is more expensive for people to ship cargo from Mindanao to Manila than from San Diego in the US to Manila,” he said.

He said the DoTC has a “rolling fund” of P6 billion for the development of ports nationwide. Concentrating this amount on a few large ports, he said, would be better than spreading it out to hundreds of smaller facilities.

Roxas, a member of President Aquino’s economic team, said he was in talks with Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala and Public Works and Highways chief Rogelio Singson for the development of a port development master plan for the country.

“We want to know where our food baskets really are. We also want to know the situation of our roads in the provinces,” he said. “We are doing this so it’s clear where we should put up grains silos and bulk-handling facilities to make port operations more efficient,” Roxas said.

“For Mindanao, we can concentrate on a few enlarged ports and transform them into bulk-handling ports. We are working very closely with Department of Public Works and Highways so that the ports that we’ll enlarge will then benefit from the construction of wider roads,” Roxas said.