Bell tolls for Filipino oceangoing fleet
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. (more…)
