A lawmaker is urging Philippine President Benigno Aquino to order all shipping of raw materials for Calabarzon economic zones diverted from Manila port to the Port of Batangas, purportedly to help ease the anticipated gridlock due to the construction of major road projects this year.
Batangas second district representative Raneo Abu, at a press conference yesterday, said using the Batangas port instead would somehow decongest the "horrifying traffic situation" in the nation's capital and nearby cities, reported BusinessWorld.
"President Aquino can actually issue an executive order to mandate all shipping vessels with cargos bound for Calabarzon to drop their goods and raw materials in Batangas City where the port is located instead of Manila," he said.
Abu pointed out that the Port of Manila and the MICP are already both experiencing too much congestion, "contrary to the claims by their respective managements since shipping companies there are collecting from the shippers a port congestion surcharge amounting to US$223.36 each."
Abu also said that the Port of Batangas is the best alternative if the government really wants to decongest the Port of Manila "since it is also accessible but less traffic-prone, without a truck ban, unlike Manila, and it is more modern."
Citing data from the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA), Abu said around 57,000 export containers were recorded in 2013, or roughly 1,250 containers per week. Of these, he noted that 86 percent of the containers being unloaded in the port terminals "were allotted for the locators in various economic zones, in which around 60 percent of it were mostly bound for the exports processing zones in the provinces of Laguna, Batangas and Cavite."
Abu said that if the Batangas port will be used instead of the Manila ports to accommodate incoming and outgoing containers for those provinces, the traffic situation in all of Metro Manila would improve.
"This will greatly help Metro Manila, especially the city of Manila. As you see, the traffic here in Metro Manila is only up to Alabang. After exiting Alabang and passing through South Luzon Expessway (SLEx), there's no more traffic there. From the Port of Batangas, it's already connected to STAR (Southern Tagalog Arterial Road) ... to SLEx and to other roads to the different economic zones," he explained.
Abu also noted that the Batangas Port Terminal has been under-utilised for years despite government spending and around $240 million in loans from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to build the country's "most modern port".
He noted that, based on a JICA study, the Batangas Port can hold up to 320,000 containers per year, "but it seems that the infrastructure hasn't been used in its full capacity, and only 11,000 containers arrived yearly, amounting to roughly just three to four percent utilisation rate."
Port operator International Container Terminal Services Inc (ICTSI) head of the Asian region Christian Gonzalez earlier opposed the push to use the Port of Batangas and said that the roads leading to the port areas – not the ports themselves – are the congested channels.
"What is lacking, and what has been lacking for the last few decades, is road infrastructure. Congestion on land is largely a result of lack of road infrastructure to match the growth of the economy. The low utilisation of our ports is likewise driven by poor road infrastructure. No shipping line or customer of a shipping line will want to use Batangas or Subic if it cannot get the majority of imports destined into the capital through the roads," Gonzales earlier said in a statement.
He noted that the whole Port of Manila handles about 3.8 million TEUs while Batangas "has a theoretical maximum capacity of no more than 300,000 TEUs today".
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