The first in Asia to launch a nationalist revolution, Filipinos are the most Westernised amongst Asian peoples, English-speaking and predominantly Christian unlike the rest of the region. They have one of the highest literacy rates and are host to the Asian Institute of Management, yet the economy lags behind some countries that send students to the Makati City-based AIM. They taught the Thais and the Vietnamese the modern way of planting rice, and now they import rice from them. Irony abounds even in the local maritime sector:
1. The Filipino Shipowners Association is almost entirely made up of manning agents, not shipowners. A good number of FSA members have bareboat chartered bottoms beneficially owned by foreigners. However, they have no effective control over the ships, their role limited to supplying the crew. It’s neither genuine ship owning nor genuine bareboat chartering.
2. Ferdinand Marcos is still despised by many Filipinos but it was during his 20-year rule that the Philippines’ maritime industry flourished. The country, for instance, used to have one of the largest ocean-going fleets in Asia and the biggest shipbuilding and shiprepair facility in Southeast Asia.
3. Filipino overseas shipping companies continue to enjoy tax breaks first introduced during the Marcos era. Yet, the country’s ocean-going fleet has been stagnating, the bulk of it made up of units bareboated from foreign owners. To add to the irony, seven Philippine-owned ships were registered in other countries (one in Cyprus, six in Panama) as of 2010, according to the CIA World Factbook.
4. The Philippines has joined the big league of shipbuilding countries, thanks to the South Korean Hanjin shipyard at the Subic Bay freeport. But it has no indigenous shipbuilding industry, and local ship construction is almost entirely in the hands of Hanjin, Keppel of Singapore and Tsuneishi of Japan.
5. The last decade saw the rise of new container terminals bankrolled by the Japanese Government – one in Batangas port (annual capacity: 400,000 TEUs), two in Subic (total of 600,000 TEUs) and one in northern Mindanao (270,000 TEUs). The capacities of all four remain badly underutilised, and some 85% of all international box traffic is still concentrated in the Port of Manila.
6. The Philippine Ports Authority continues to forbid privately-owned Harbour Centre Port Terminal Inc (HCPTI) from handling containerised cargoes, restricting it to non-containerised cargoes. The policy is aimed at preventing “unfair competition” from HCPTI against the Manila South Harbor and the Manila International Container Terminal, two neighbouring facilities run by private concessionaires but owned by the PPA. This is a case of the State promoting its own business to the detriment of Business.
7. The country has a total of 95 schools offering baccalaureate programmes in maritime transportation and marine engineering. Many cadets, however, are unable to complete their schooling because there are not enough berths for their 12-month shipboard apprenticeship. So the poor lads sometimes end up working as waiters, salesmen, private security guards and even janitors.
8. It’s not only manning agents who make use of maritime flunkeys – young men from nautical colleges who work as unpaid office help in exchange for the promise of being deployed as entry-level crew. The unions, including the ITF-affiliated AMOSUP, are also into the practice.
9. Neither the executives nor the rank and file (with some exceptions) of the Maritime Industry Authority, the flag state administration, come from the merchant marine profession. The same is true with the secretariat of the inter-agency Maritime Training Council, which has no in-house maritime expertise to speak of and needs to rely on private sector “experts”.
10. Filipinos love to call themselves a maritime nation with a long seafaring tradition. How come they have no maritime literature, no martiime art and no maritime festivals as found in other countries considered “maritime”? ~Barista Uno
Mr. Barista please be informed that as an employee of the MARITIME INDUSTRY AUTHORITY, the MARINA has well trained inspectors and ISM auditors and some of us here came from the maritime profession. I, for one is a Chief Officer in the overseas trade with experience of 23 years onboard international vessels.
I am also a captain of High Speed Crafts in the domestic trade for 3 years.
Please research further before making any comments. Thank you.
The portion of the article pertaining to the MARINA has been corrected (added “with some exceptions”). We were aware that some of the agency’s staff had sailing experience. Still, the MARINA cannot be said to be run by seasoned merchant marine professionals as in the case of the flag state administrations in other countries. Your three years as captain of domestic fast ferries would seem to validate the point.Thanks very much for your comment.
Very strong picture and diagnosis of what works–and what doesn’t–in Philippine maritime business. Here (in the US) national commercial health seems to be sacrificed to short-term business profits.
Thanks, Barista Uno!
I appreciated very much your post. It is a very wise and true statement.
I was the ITF Campaign Against Flags of Convenience’s Coordinator in Brasil, during 7 years (from 1993 to 2000) and, in 2000, I was in Manila to attend an ITF Inspectors’ Meeting.
I had the opportunity to visit the recently (at that time) inaugurated Merchant Marine School (sponsored by Norges). It was very well equipped, but, pardon me, looks more military than merchant.
The school was based in an island and we went there by boat (a beautiful boat) named “Captain Oca” after the man that was the most important union leader at the time in Philippines.
Ten years have passed by, I’m retired now (62 years old), but I continue following what is going on in the maritime world because seafaring was and is the only profession that I could perform and it was and is the most important thing that happened in my life.
I really love the sea. Not to look at it from a beach, but to live in it as I lived during so many years (in my first embarkment I was 20 years old). I still work sometimes as a temporary Captain today, but due to serious health problems (cardiac ones and diabetes) I can’t stand more than 3 months’ engagements.
I would like to die onboard of a ship. My family knows it and most of my friends too. Also, my employers (generally, they consider it as a joke, even in the sight of my medical exams).
Well, but why I’m still working? Mainly because I love the life at sea and, because the owners and agents insist on the low salaries on the conventional ships and the young seafarers prefer the offshore companies that pays the double and have a better rest period.
As, I and many others guys of my age, have the retirement salaries (in Brasil) and have no more the necessary punch to face the hard work on tugboats those salaries are acceptable (for us). The average age of Officers and ranks today on conventional ships in Brasil is more than 60 years old.
Well, it was a long deviation from the main subject, but as I worked those 7 years attending people from your country, as well, from Burma and other countries, seafarers that were misled and turned wide astray by fake smart shipowners,
PS: At last, this turned to be a very long post. It’s up to you to post it entirely or to cut it, or even ignore it. In reality, this is more a spewing of an old salt than anything.
Thanks for your kind comment and for sharing your experiences. It’s good to know that Marine Cafe Blog is being read in Brazil and by an old salt at that.
More power to you, Sir.
Hello from England. It is not only in the Philippines where we have these ironies. We in the UK used to build about 50% of the wolrd’s ships and now we barely have a handful of shipyards left.
The Royal Navy used to rule the waves and now we don’t even have aircraft carriers left.
Glen