Local folks, including some maritime executives who should know better, never tire of saying the Philippines is a maritime country. It’s an archipelago, after all, consisting of 7,107 islands. Our curt reply to them: So is Fiji in the South Pacific. A small nation with some 332 islands, the Fijians have a tiny merchant fleet which the CIA World Factbook pegs at 10 ships, two of them Australian-owned. The Filipinos are not better off, a fact which stared us in the face the other day.

We were at the Maritime Industry Authority in Manila with a good friend of ours, an old sea dog, chatting with Administrator Emerson Lorenzo over coffee. Afterward, we decided to drop by the MARINA Overseas Shipping Office to see how the overseas fleet was doing. The information we obtained was something we weren’t exactly prepared for. Of the 171 oceangoing ships totaling 5.42 million dwt that were registered under the flag as of April 2011, only one was beneficially owned by a Philippine company. All the rest were bareboat chartered tonnage owned by foreigners.

One hundred seventy-one ships flying the national flag are nothing to sneeze at and may even be a source of pride for some Filipinos. The truth, however, is that bareboat chartering in the Philippines is but manning in disguise. It’s a bogus set-up with the local bareboat charterers having no real control over the ships. Why, these companies don’t even know where the bareboated ships are at any given time.

But who in Manila gives a hang? Filipinos are too obsessed with crewing other nations’ fleets to care about the demise of their own. Nonetheless, the latest statistics should spook Mr Lorenzo and his underlings at the MARINA like a bolt of lightning. No nation has the right to call itself ‘maritime’ whose oceangoing fleet is virtually non-existent. ~Barista Uno