IN an archipelagic region that includes some 24,000 islands spread across 5,200 kilometers east to west and 3,400 km from north to south, Southeast Asia is defined by the sea.
The maritime sector is crucial to Asean countries’ connectivity, with shipping services, ports, shipbuilding and seafaring core activities in vast parts of the region. For centuries the region has been a crossroad of global seaborne trade, a fact reflected in the scale of Asean’s maritime industries.
Singapore is the fifth-largest register of shipping in the world, with some 3,339 vessels carrying that country’s flag with a total of almost 90 million tons. Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand operate some 8,233 seagoing merchant vessels.
The Philippines ranks as the largest single supplier of manpower to the global shipping industry with an estimated 1.5 million Filipino seafarers, comprising one of the country’s largest sources of remittance earnings at some $4.8 billion a year. The Philippines is now looking at the “blue economy” and we are working on making the Philippines a center for business- process outsourcing for ships, too, with focus on ship management and crew management. Additionally, the Philippines is considering to become a register/Philippine flag country also.
Recent decades have seen a growing focus on shipbuilding in the region, with Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines as major players. There are around 120 shipbuilding and repair facilities in the Philippines, and some 45,000 working in the industry. The country’s yards are capable of building a wide range of vessels up to 180,000 tons.
The creation of the Asean Economic Community is based upon the free flow of goods and people. This, in turn, depends on the establishment of an efficient and integrated maritime- transport sector in the region. Possessing access to the world’s oceans is little advantage without modern ports, sound logistics and effective management of maritime facilities. There are many areas requiring improvement in order to promote a safe, modern, efficient and competitive shipping sector in the region. There are growing pressures to enhance port facilities, particularly container-handling capacities. Container ships carry an estimated 52 percent of global seaborne trade in terms of value. Modern container vessels are also increasing in size. In less than a decade container ships have almost doubled in size. Ships able to carry 18,400 containers have just entered service. Larger Asean ports have to address pressures on their existing container-handling capacity. The new management of the Philippine Department of Transportation is focusing on ports, looking at Batangas and Subic as alternatives to Manila, would like to see Cebu Port to improve and see three ports in Mindanao of importance: Cagayan de Oro, Davao and General Santos.
It is a method of maritime connectivity, when accompanied by investment in roads and railways, which can stimulate a range of economic sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing and tourism, by creating much larger markets for private enterprise. In archipelagic nations, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, maritime economic corridors are seen as having considerable domestic impact and are set to have an even wider influence as they begin increasingly to carry over maritime borders. The concept has already proved its worth in the Philippines, where the Asian Development Bank concluded that the approach and experience warrants serious consideration for the whole region. The advantages are that large up-front capital investment is not needed and an entire system can be built up gradually, including port facilities and road connections.
Nautical highways have also revealed new markets for agriculture and fishing produce by making it viable to reach new areas in a cost-effective and timely way, reaching clients easily through roll-on, roll-off shipping networks.
