EDITORIAL- Truck holiday

It’s that time of the year again, when congestion worsens at the Port of Manila and traffic crawls even slower around the country’s principal seaport.

Next week, traffic and congestion in clearing shipments are expected to ease, but for the wrong reason: Customs brokers and truckers have announced plans to stage a six-day holiday beginning Monday, at the height of the Christmas season, in protest against the planned phase-out of old trucks.

The Alliance of Philippine Brokers and Truckers Association said phasing out truck models older than 15 years would put 90 percent of small truckers out of business and render their drivers and other employees jobless. The group said only large international shipping companies would benefit from the phase-out planned by the Department of Transportation.

The group also complained that it takes from three days to a week merely to return empty containers to the Manila port, with international shipping companies lacking space to accommodate all the containers. The truckers shoulder the costs and penalties for this, according to the group.

Business groups have expressed concern for some time over the congestion at the Port of Manila, which raises logistics costs and the prices of many goods, both raw materials and finished products. Proposals have been made to decongest the port, including the diversion of more shipments to the container ports in Batangas and Subic. Yet the problem of congestion persists. Certain proposed long-term measures, such as the construction of a rail network to transport cargo to and from the Manila port, keep getting bogged down in corruption scandals and other controversies.

For the short term, the government wants to phase out old delivery trucks. Small operators who mostly own the older model vehicles, however, account for a significant segment of trucking services. Their concerns in the planned phase-out must be properly addressed or the logistics sector could be crippled by something worse than vehicular traffic jams at the Manila port.