Is our shipping industry hopeless?

For an archipelago, we surely have a shipping industry that's hardly adequate. Reports of ships sinking with massive loss of lives have become regular to the point of being invisible even when news media make them top stories. Our shipping companies are also blamed for making farm produce from Visayas and Mindanao unable to compete on a landed basis in Metro Manila with imports from Thailand or Vietnam.

Take a look at the inter-island vessels that ply our seas. These patched up poor excuses we call ships are outdated hand-me-downs mostly from Japan. Much like our jeepneys, these vessels are often poorly maintained and eternally overloaded. We force our people to take extreme risks on their lives every time they board these vessels. Worse, they have absolutely no choice.

Yet, we could have a world class shipping industry. Our 200,000 sailors man 20 percent of the total world fleet and they remit more than $2 billion a year back home. And our sailors are among the world's best. A Greek observer in the recently concluded World Press Freedom Day conference held here, approached me and STAR publisher Max Soliven only to tell us we are missing a great opportunity by not doing anything about our shipping industry.

He said he is in international shipping and he goes to Manila regularly. He has always wondered, he said, why we have failed to exploit our advantage and thereby move on to be a major maritime country. Look at Liberia and Panama, he declared, they register most of the world's fleets and make all the money but they don't even have the quality sailors the Philippines has.

Then, the Greek asked, how come you are satisfied with just supplying the manpower for the world's fleets and have taken no moves to get more of the money that could be made in the world's shipping industry? Neither Max nor I had the answer to that one. All I could say was, maybe he should talk to Doris Magsaysay Ho. Of course, he knew Doris.

Just so happened I bumped into Doris a few days later and told her about this conversation. He is right, Doris said, which is why the local maritime industry has gotten together to propose changes in the way they operate and in the way our laws regulate them so that they can modernize and compete. They have made a presentation before some committees in Congress and that's where they are now.

They are worried that even our position as the preferred supplier of sailors is under threat from China and Eastern Bloc countries. They also have a modest goal of being able to carry at least 50 percent of our import and export trade by 2010. But they must first modernize and they can't do this without capital. International banks aren't inclined to lend the kind of money our local shipping industry needs because our laws make it difficult for lenders to enforce the mortgage and the foreclosure of vessels.

That legal problem among many others need to be addressed by Congress soonest. Actually, there may be a window of opportunity for us if we get our act together. According to The Economist, the world is slowly waking up to the dangers of allowing shipping to operate under the cloak offered by FOCs: no questions asked so long as the shipowner pays registration fees and tonnage taxes. There are fears that Osama bin Laden and his band of terrorists may be operating a fleet of ships under FOC registry and could use these to attack American ports.

If the Americans were serious in their anti terrorism drive, The Economist observed, they could ban brass-plate ships from their ports and force most FOCs as we know them today, to close shop. What should stop us from being a new Liberia or Panama but with safeguards necessary in today's terrorist stricken world? Only our imagination and our Congress, perhaps can limit what we can do in the world shipping industry to fully exploit our advantage.

We certainly have no time to waste.

Virginians now

I don't know if it was "usapang lasing" but a Pinoy who lives part of the year in the Washington DC area swears that two former Erap Cabinet members have settled down in pretty expensive real estate in Northern Virginia. One of them bought an estate worth a million and a half dollars. The other is living in a ranch worth over $33 million.

I remember that when opposition to the Marcos dictatorship was heating up, then opposition assemblyman Orly Mercado went to the US to film the alleged Marcos real estate properties there. Maybe it is time that someone did that again, just to update everyone back home and most specially, the BIR and the Ombudsman.

I wonder what their American neighbors think of their new rich neighbors from an impoverished Third World country.

Quality education

Further to our column last Wednesday, someone sent in a suggestion that CHED in cooperation with private sector experts in education, should devise a way by which the public can judge the quality of education being provided by specific colleges and universities.

Maybe such a rating system could be based, but not entirely, on the criteria used by Asiaweek and other magazines in rating top centers of learning in the region and the world. The performing ones ought to be rewarded by giving them tax breaks (if applicable) and greater leeway in setting their tuition fees. Those that are at the bottom of the list and obviously diploma mills should also be dealt with accordingly.

Nowhere is this rating system as necessary as in schools offering medical education. I was with a group of doctors recently, and there was talk of a new medical college affiliated with a well-known hospital that failed to get any of its graduates to pass the medical board examinations. Maybe this is an exaggeration but the thought is scary. The worse that an ill-trained lawyer can inflict on us is he might end up being a corrupt politician. But a medical graduate who is less than capable can kill people.

I remember my late father who told us that whenever a stupid student managed to pass his course at the UST College of Medicine simply because of some statistical fluke, he would call that student and make him swear that under no circumstances will he ever treat a Chanco.

Golf fanatic

This one is from reader Orly Morabe.

There’s a fellow who is an avid golfer. Actually he’s a golf fanatic. Every Saturday morning he has an early tee time, and he golfs all day long.

One Saturday morning, he gets up early, dresses quietly, gets his clubs out of the closet, and goes out to his car to drive to the course. It is raining cats and dog! There is snow mixed with the rain and the wind is blowing at 50 mph.

So... He comes back into the house and turns the TV to the Weather Channel. There he finds it’s going to be bad weather all day long.

He puts his clubs back into the closet, quietly undresses and slips back into bed where he cuddles up to his wife’s back, and whispers, "The weather out there is terrible."

To which she replies, "Can you believe my stupid husband is out golfing?"

(Boo Chanco's e-mail address is [email protected])