Traveling within Mindanao

Last week I was with a group that had to travel from Cagayan de Oro to Zamboanga City. And so we flew…through Manila. We traveled a total distance of some 1,650 kilometers, or five times the 330 km that actually separates the two Mindanao cities. We could have also flown via Davao or Cebu, but the schedules didn’t suit our needs. But direct flights will soon be available, we learned.

We could have chosen to travel by land. Google Maps says it would take 6 hours and 11 minutes to travel 464 km of road between them. If that’s indeed the actual travel time, then there’s virtually no time difference between flying and driving, adding airport waiting times to flight times. One would have to consider quality of the roads and travel comfort as well. One thing looks sure to me: Once those direct flights become available, it would make eminent sense for most travelers to opt for flying. It thus makes a great deal of sense for the airlines to offer those direct flights, as they now are reportedly about to do. Good news for Mindanao, I’d say.

While it is moving fast, Mindanao has a long way to go in the area of transport. To be sure, it has come a long way from the 1980s, when Mindanao’s major cities—Davao, General Santos, Cagayan de Oro, Zamboanga and Butuan—had separate enclaves of economic growth that hardly related to one another. They were, rather, satellite economies individually linked more to Metro Manila and Cebu rather than to one another such as to comprise a unified Mindanao economy. Deliberate moves in the 1990s and onwards changed all that, as the arterial road links connecting these cities were paved and widened, and telecommunications facilities were upgraded. Meanwhile, domestic air travel was opened to competition, while regional airports were upgraded. Ports facilities were improved, and the roll-on roll-off (Ro-Ro) nautical highway was deliberately pursued and expanded nationwide. As a result, there is now much greater semblance of one Mindanao regional economy, rather than having “several Mindanaos,” a common lament in the past.

Still, Mindanao’s road network continues to be far inferior to that elsewhere in the country. Its percentage of unpaved roads (35 percent as of 2009) is too high compared to Luzon’s (24 percent) and the Visayas’ (16 percent). The problem is worse with the local roads, which are six times longer than the national roads, with an even smaller proportion paved. The Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao has the least paved local roads (only 11 percent). Local governments, especially those in the remote rural and upland areas, simply do not have enough resources, if at all, to improve road surface and conditions. Thus, the bulk of funding for barangay roads comes from congressional pork barrel or insertions made by legislators to the national budget.

Meanwhile, people from Mindanao have also long dreamed of a railway system to interconnect the island’s growth centers. Many imagine being able to hop onto a train in Cagayan de Oro, for example, and get to Zamboanga, Cotabato or Davao a few hours later. But the very high cost of such railway system puts to question its economic viability. Nonetheless, short-run railways in high traffic areas are being seriously considered. An 82.5-km railway from Cagayan de Oro to Iligan has long been studied and considered for possible foreign funding. It is hoped others will follow.

Water transport inevitably must play a major role in an archipelagic area such as Mindanao, counting hundreds of inhabited islands and at least 138 ports. However, ship calls have declined in recent years, traced to high shipping and handling costs, and safety concerns due to aging vessels and frequent maritime accidents. Both are traced to lack of competition in the industry that dampens the impetus for modernization and service improvement. Meanwhile, there has been a marked shift to the Ro-Ro system, which has cut both cost and time of transport services. Mindanao in fact appears to have benefited most from Ro-Ro, having moved far more vehicles than both Luzon and the Visayas, even if the latter has far more islands and Ro-Ro ports (37 against Mindanao’s 21). Beyond inter-island and coastal transport, it also makes sense to push for more passenger and cargo travel via the numerous Mindanao river systems especially those that feed into economic centers. Indeed, many locals assert that rivers found wide use as a mode of transport in the more distant past.

With a marked decline in ship passenger traffic over recent years has come a phenomenal upsurge in airline travel. Mindanao airports moved 5.1 million passengers in 2009, registering a 25-percent growth rate from the year before. This was much higher than the already high national average growth of 14.1 percent in 2009. The biggest contributors, expectedly, were Region XI (through the Davao City Airport) and Region X (Cagayan de Oro Airport). But Region XII (Soccsksargen) grew fastest at 48.2 percent, and air passenger growth in other parts of Mindanao has been similarly brisk. While I haven’t had the chance to get more recent data, it’s plain to see that the surge continues and promises to continue into the future.

One can now fly directly between Davao and Zamboanga, or Davao and Cagayan de Oro. Soon we will see direct flights between Cagayan de Oro and Zamboanga. All this is good news for Mindanao, and in turn for the country as a whole. To me, they all attest that the regional economy in Mindanao is fast advancing. Once a peace agreement is finally reached, one can imagine how much farther ahead Mindanao (and the country) can zoom.

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Comments welcome at chabito@ateneo.edu