A TOP official of the Board of Investment in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BOI-Armm) said the establishment of the trilateral maritime patrol (TMP) arrangement between Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines will boost business confidence in the autonomous region.
BOI-Armm chairman Ishak Mastura said the TMP is an important development for the region “because the people from our island provinces have been doing cross-border trade since time immemorial and even before there were borders to cross.”
The island provinces of Armm are Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi, which are close to Indonesia and Malaysia.
Mastura said incidents of piracy and lawlessness in the Sulu Sea did not prevent traditional cross-border trade “but international transshipment was affected by it.”
“By conducting trilateral border patrols we believe that transshipment, wherein bigger volumes of cargoes are safely moved among the three countries, can make a comeback,” he said.
The TMP was launched on Monday, June 19, in the island of Tarakan, Indonesia.
Armm Governor Mujiv Hataman also welcomed the TMP, saying it would ensure security for traders in the Armm who are doing business in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Hataman said traders in Armm have been doing businesses in these neighboring areas for centuries through barter trading.
He said tighter security measures in the Sulu Sea would also help as the regional government is pushing for the revival of barter trading to curb smuggling activities in southern Philippines.
The defense department of Indonesia, Malaysia and Philippines, have agreed to step-up security measures in the roughly one million square-kilometer tri-border area in the Sulu-Sulawesi Seas.
The TMP was agreed upon following a spike in hijacking in the last quarter of 2016, where local terrorist Abu Sayyaf group attacked international vessels and kidnapped sailors.
This tri-border area is among the major trade routes in Southeast Asia. The route is the fishing ground of commercial fishery operators, specifically those into tuna and sardines operations.
This route is also used by Indonesian suppliers of coal for power plants in Mindanao and in the transshipment of major goods between Sabah in Malaysia and the island provinces of Basilan, Sulu, and Tawi-Tawi. (SunStar Philippines)