MARINE TRANSPORTATION MUST BE STRENGTHENED

Marine transportation plays an important role in international as well as domestic trading. Marine transportation also opens access and connects archipelagic regions, whether advanced or isolated regions. As an archipelagic country, Indonesia requires marine transportation. Globalization challenges related to marine affairs consist of marine transportation, communications system, urbanization in coastal areas, and marine tourism. Therefore, there has to be an ocean policy accommodating marine transportation in a marine country.

It must be admitted that the development of marine transportation has not been satisfactory until now. In marine transportation field, Indonesia has not had sufficient number of ships in terms of the quantity as well the capacity. Therefore, by considering a highly substantial marine transportation potency, it is time for Indonesia to strengthen its marine transportation. In addition to that, archipelagic sea is connecting islands in this country. Therefore, strengthening of marine transportation vessels across Indonesia must be performed.

Director General of Sea Communications, Leon Muhammad, in Jakarta (Tuesday, 7/31/2012) stated that marine transportation must be strengthened, particularly in regions that have larger marine territory if compared to their land territory, for example in Maluku. According to Leon, adequate marine transportation could accelerate development, improve the economy, and cause closeness of social relations in the regions concerned? Strengthening of marine transportation has a strategic role, not only from the economic aspect, but also from the aspect of marine safety strategy, Leon said.

Leon said that the sea becomes important because 75% of size of Indonesian territory is the sea territory, and the remaining 25% is land territory. Therefore, the concept to strengthen the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia is by connecting all regions across Indonesia separated by the seas. If the sea cannot play role as a connector, political connectivity between central and regional government will not be able to accommodate global development. Consequently, there might be regions separated by the sea from the central government will chose to build connectivity with other countries in the future.

He admitted that problem of even distribution of national economic development still becomes an unsolved classical problem. Socio-economic imbalance is felt by a major part of the society, particularly in eastern part of Indonesia. According to him, solving this problem must become a priority. The gap that is occurring must be stopped by minimizing the gap between western and eastern part of Indonesia. In the future, the sea should be optimized as a source of life for the Indonesian people. We are aware of Indonesia’s characteristics as an archipelagic country, which is by strengthening marine transportation so that economic cost will be more efficient?, he said.

Meanwhile, in the framework of responding to many complaints from the public, particularly the businesses, regarding expensive logistic costs that cause logistic costs to be far more expensive in the regions, especially in eastern Indonesia, Leon said that the government will create a system called Nusantara Pendulum as Indonesia’s International gateway to strengthen marine transportation so it will be able to improve its domestic transportation.

He explained that the Nusantara Pendulum system will become one of the services to operate in six main ports, namely Jakarta, Batam, Surabaya, Makassar, Belawan, and Sorong, and a scheduled route will be made and other will follow like an integrated sub-systems. The Nusantara Pendulum will minimize unexpected costs. To realize this, improvement and development of the existing ports should be performed to become adequate ports and to be able to improve services.

Business News - August 3, 2012