US Aid Helps Boost General Santos Tuna Industry ff

For Democrito J. Jazmin Jr., president of Pescador Sea Trading and head of the local cooperative of hand-line fishers of tuna in this city of half a million, business has never been the same since the state-of-the-art Tambler fishport started up in 1998. The fishport is one of the big-ticket infrastructure projects that were put up from the $200-million American and Japanese grants and loans in the mid-1990s.

“We used to land fish at the Lion’s Beach [near the heart of the city’s central business district] under unsanitary and chaotic conditions,” Jazmin says.

The modern fishport—financed by the Japanese Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund—has a 300-meter-long wharf and is equipped with cold storage and modern blast-freezing facilities. It is part of the foreign-assisted projects under the Philippine Assistance Program—also known then as the “mini-Marshall Plan” for the Philippines—after the fall of President Ferdinand Marcos.
 
Besides the fishport, the city also got an expanded and modernized Makar Wharf, an all-weather, 178-km road network connecting the city to 10 municipalities, and an international airport that can accommodate a 747 commercial jet, financed largely by grants from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

“Now our operations are more sanitary and orderly,” says Jazmin, who produces tuna sashimi and other marine products. “That really helped our marketing efforts. With the new international airport, we are now exporting fresh chilled and frozen tuna straight to the United States, the Middle East, Europe and Japan.”

One of the largest in the Philippines, General Santos’ new $48.6-million airport is equipped with modern navigational aids and can handle wide-body aircraft, a grant from USAID. Its huge terminal and 3,200-meter by 45-meter runway are designed to handle increasing passenger and cargo traffic.

“About 10 to 15 tons of tuna exports alone go through that airport,” Jazmin told The Times.

For Jazmin, an accountant, his thriving fish business fulfills his dream to make it big after leaving his procurement job at the Navotas port complex 20 years ago. He shares this success with thousands more in the city and nearby towns and provinces.

Jazmin says tuna fishing, particularly the hand-line method being used by most small fishers, is labor-intensive. A typical hand-line fishing boat employs 10 people. With about 3,000 hand-liners and several hundreds of smaller boats complementing them, Jazmin estimates that the jobs directly created by hand-line fishing alone could reach at least 48,000 people. “Many of these hand-line fishers were former rebels.”

Statistics provided by the Philippine Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) show that 26 purse seiners—commercial fishers using huge ships and advanced technology to catch and process tuna and other marine products—employ at least 10,000 people.

Seven fish canneries, tuna fillet processors and tin-can manufacturers are also providing jobs to 11,500 workers. Total direct employment in the entire tuna industry therefore could easily reach 70,000.

Pedro Acharon Jr., the city mayor, says the expansion in the city’s fishing industry also led to the growth of allied industries including trucking, ship and boat repair, construction, and fishing-related services.

“More than 60 percent of the city’s revenue now comes from the fishing industry and allied industries,” Acharon says.
 
Domingo Teng, general manager of the TSP Marine Industries, says the benefits of growth fostered by the new economic infrastructures have spread to other sectors of the local economy. Many who made a pile from fishing put their profits into real estate, high-value crops, commercial trees, shopping malls and hotels.

Today, South Cotabato, Sultan Kudarat, Sarangani and General Santos (Socsksargen) are a vibrant globally-oriented economy exporting a wide range of products including, tuna chunks, frozen yellowfin tuna, frozen round scad, fresh pineapple and processed pineapple products, smoked fish, fresh asparagus, copra meal pellets, rubber cuplumps, fresh bananas, banana chips, deboned bangus (milkfish) and frozen shrimp.
 
“Those foreign-assisted projects—the airport, the fishport in Tambler and the expanded Makar wharf—really triggered a lot of economic activities,” says Teng. “It was a catalyst that changed General Santos as well as the entire Socsksargen.”

Teng and other business leaders, however, admit that since the completion of the major infrastructure projects in 1999, investments have tapered off. Most of them blame the East Asian currency crisis of 1997 and eventually the series of fires and terrorist incidents that struck the city in early 2002.

“[Since then], peace and order has been a lingering concern here among business people,” says Teng. He adds that unless the continuing peace process succeeds, security concerns would continue to hobble the city’s drive for progress.

In April last year, many business establishments were alarmed at receiving extortion letters from supposed Moro rebels. A month later, fires hit two big shopping centers. Then a series of deadly bombings rocked that city and neighboring Koronadal, the capital town of South Cotabato.

“We don’t have international flights yet,” says Partridge, an American expatriate who came to work for Dole Philippines in 1968 in nearby Polomolok. “Besides the P1.2-billion Makar wharf expansion that will be funded by the Chinese, we don’t have many new big investments these days.”

Teng says not a single violent incident happened following the capture of the bombings’ mastermind last year, but the city’s image as an investment destination has yet to recover. DTI data show that investments measured in terms of authorized capital dropped to about P5 billion in 2000 from almost P10 billion a year earlier. And it continued to drop to almost P2 billion in 2001 and P1.121 billion in 2002.

“If only we don’t have peace and order problem here, we could have grown a lot faster,” says Teng, explaining that several investors from Japan, South Korean and Taiwan shelved their investments in General Santos after last year’s violent incidents.

According to John C. Dalton, deputy chief of party of the Growth with Equity in Mindanao (GEM) based in Davao City, General Santos’ business leaders may have gotten used to the high growth years from 1995 to 1998, when a lot of changes were happening at breakneck speed, particularly during the construction phase of the foreign-assisted projects that lasted until 1999.

“Growth in the area seemed to have peaked and plateaued since then,” he says, stressing the continued “ripple effect” of growth into General Santos City’s neighboring provinces.
Dalton says in 2003 the USAID came up with $55 million “GEM Part 2.” This time, Dalton says, the program would “promote exports” of selected products like tuna, fruits, seaweeds, vegetables, and aquaculture by strengthening Mindanao’s producer associations. There are also small, community-level but high-impact social and infrastructure projects in “conflict-affected areas” including Lanao, Sulu, Tawi-Tawi, Basilan, Lanao, Maguindanao and Cotabato.
 
Whether this new project would make a big difference in conflict-affected areas remains to be seen.

“Ultimately, the sustainability of many projects [introduced by GEM] would depend on the success of the continuing peace process,” Dalton says.

Source: Philippine Press