Indonesia president opens Priok port expansion in Jakarta - Reuters
World News
September 13, 2016
“We cannot delay the development of modern ports any longer. This supports trade flows and investment in this country,”
President Widodo said at the opening of New Priok Container Terminal (NPCT) 1 in Kalibaru, the first of five phases of an expansion of Priok port that are to be completed in 2019.
Tanjung Priok port in North Jakarta, which handles the bulk of international shipments into Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, has been plagued with bottlenecks and long handling times due to years of under investment.
Logistics costs in Indonesia are up to 2.5 times higher than in neighboring countries, Widodo said.
“If we’re slow we’ll be left behind,” he said.
Widodo has taken a special interest in reducing port dwell times, part of his government’s broad efforts to improve the nation’s infrastructure to drive economic growth. Dwell time at Priok is now between 3.2 and 3.7 days, down from up to a week in 2014, Widodo said, adding that he has asked for the wait to be reduced to less than three days.
Bringing Priok in line with global standards will depend on how quickly it can move cargo away from the docks, and whether it can alleviate congestion problems that slow the movement of ships and cargo, increasing costs for exporters and importers, shipping experts said.
“The expansion of Tanjung Priok may encourage shipping lines to launch more direct ship calls to Jakarta, but I do not see it as a major threat to Singapore’s transhipment status,”
said Jonathan Beard, head of transportation and logistics in Asia for design and consultancy firm Arcadis. The new terminal adds 1.5 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) to Priok’s existing 7 million TEU annual capacity, said Elvyn Masassya, CEO of Pelabuhan Indonesia (Pelindo) II, Indonesia’s state-owned port company that operates NPCT 1 in a consortium that includes Singapore’s PSA International and Tokyo-listed Mitsui (8031.T). With 8 cranes that can move 30 containers per hour and berths that can dock ships with a draft of as much as 16 meters, the new terminal will allow Priok to accommodate vessels carrying 10,000 TEUs from Europe and East Asia for the first time, Masassya said. According to senior maritime consultant Jakob Sorensen, this depth would be adequate to meet Priok’s “current and near future requirements for container vessels.”
Deep Sea and Foreign Going by Rose George - review
Sukhdev Sandhu is startled by how much we rely on container ships
Sukhdev Sandhu
Fri 13 Sep 2013
In The Sea Inside, his recent tribute to the imaginative potency of the ocean, Philip Hoare decried the rise of the container ship: "No one rhapsodises over these maritime pantechnicons," he observed. "No one celebrates their arrival after heroic journeys to and from the other side of the world." Containerisation is widely seen as a symbol for much of what's wrong with modern society – the way it renders bustling port cities into semi-anonymous non-places, its emphasis on profitability over people, its role in ushering in an especially alienated form of globalisation.
According to Rose George, even the men who work on container ships don't show much interest in the boxes they transport: "They think they are boring, opaque, blank. Stuff carrying stuff." But she finds that blankness "entrancing" and, in Deep Sea and Foreign Going, an account of a five-week trip from Felixstowe to Singapore, has penetrated a world noted for its secrecy – most container ports, heavily protected by barbed wire and security cameras, are segregated from the cities in which they are found – to produce an ethnographic travelogue that is as fascinating as it is troublingly insightful.
The cultural theorist Paul Virilio has argued that "we are moving from a revolution in transport to one in loading". That's not exactly the kind of revolution that makes front-page news. Part of the challenge for anyone who writes about logistics and infrastructure is to show how a subject that appears remote impacts on the lives of the general public.
George does this by the simple trick of opening her eyes: aboard an English train she looks at the headphones, uniforms and trolley food in front of her and explains that almost all of them have been brought here by ship. The reason is economics: shipping has become so cheap, she explains, that it's less costly for Scottish cod to be sent 10,000 miles to China to be filleted and then exported back to restaurants here than it is to pay the (already small) salaries of Scottish filleters.
Container ships, often assumed to be more environmentally sound than sending freight by road or air, are catastrophic in other ways too: collectively they produce more pollution than Germany; by 2008 the sewage they discharge had created more than 400 oceanic dead zones; in Los Angeles the sulphur dioxide they spew is responsible for half the city's smog; the level of underwater noise they generate is rising by three decibels every decade and causing acoustic hell for fin and blue whales.
It's rare for researchers to get access to container ships: owners often have a lot to hide. George's Maersk shipping line-sponsored voyage is not conventionally eventful (she spends a lot of time playing backgammon with a terse third officer), but her arguments are action-packed. In an excellent chapter set in the Gulf of Aden she skewers (tacitly) historians such as Marcus Rediker, who represent pirates as radicals who subverted the values of Atlantic capitalism and (explicitly) Harvard Business School, which, in 2010, selected Somali piracy as its business model.
Some readers may want to hear more first-hand accounts from Asian workers on board the containers.
Those who are theoretically inclined and eager to understand the relationship between containerisation and coastal "exo-urbanism" will turn first to Olivier Mongin's Villes Sous Pression. But this is still a remarkable work of embedded reportage – hair-raising, witty, compassionate – that deserves to be read alongside Allan Sekula's groundbreaking Fish Story (1996) and by anyone interested in the cartographies of the contemporary world.
Fish Story
FISH STORY by ALLEN SEKULA
Fish Story by Allen Sekula is mentioned above in Sukhdev Sandhu's review of Deep Sea and Foreign Going by Rose George.
The "blurb" at MACK, advertising this commodity, a product of "critical realism", says:
Completed between 1989 and 1995, Fish Story saw Allan Sekula’s career-long pursuit of a contemporary ‘critical realism' reach its most complex articulation. Fish Story reconstructed a realist model of photographic representation, while taking a critical stance towards traditional documentary photography. It also marked Sekula’s first sustained exploration of the ocean as a key space of globalisation. A key issue in Fish Story is the connection between containerized cargo movement and the growing internationalization of the world industrial economy, with its effects on the actual social space of ports.
The ambition of Fish Story lies both in its immense complexity and global scope and in its emphatic challenge to the dominant climate of postmodern theory and practice of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Fish Story occupies a pivotal place in a gradual shift, still nascent in the early 1990s, from a widespread culture of resignation and cynicism to one of renewed radical engagement in the art world.
In the the section of the work titled RED PASSENGER Sekula references Frederick Engels The Condition of the Working Class in England.
Sekula notes that Engels account begins aboard the deck of a ship, and like the beginning of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the ship's location is the River Thames, and sailing towards London Bridge from Woolwich.
"For Engels, the increasing congestion of the Thames anticipated a narrative movement into the narrow alleys of the London slums. Very quickly, the maritime view - panoramic, expansive, and optimistic - led to an urban scene reduced to a claustrophobic Hobbesian war of all against all."
Sekula then notes that Engels original "geographical passage from river to city was on a more subtle level a historical shift from one motive force to another:"
"the river was still ruled by wind while the city ran on coal."
Sekula quotes a footnote that Engels added to the 1892 German reissue of his book The Condition of the Working Class in England:
"This was so nearly fifty years ago, in the days of picturesque sailing vessels. In so far as ships still ply to and from London, they are only to be found in the docks, while the river itself is covered with ugly, sooty steamers."
Twenty five years ago,
this was the scene on
the Jakarta Sunda Kelapa
quay where the traditional
"pinisi" are loaded and
unloaded with the cargoes
of the wide Indonesian
archipelago.
Pinisi
The pinisi or phinisi are a type of rig, that includes the masts, sails and the configuration of the ropes (‘lines’) of Indonesian sailing vessels.
Last of the engineless pinisi setting sail for Java with a cargo of sawn timber, Banjarmasin, South-East Kalimantan 1983.
Today the term pinisi is often applied to the very large, motorised timber ships that replaced them, hand-built in the South Sulawesi style by Bugis or Makassan shipwrights and trading all over Indonesia. Some still carry small auxiliary sails. In ports where these contemporary ‘pinisi’ traders gather in large numbers, such as Jakarta’s Sunda Kelapa, they’re a tourist attraction.
Mainly built by the Konjo tribe of the Bulukumba regency of South Sulawesi, and still used widely by the Buginese and Makassarese, for inter-insular transportation, cargo and fishing within the Indonesian archipelago.
UNESCO designated Pinisi boat-building art as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity at the 12th Session of the Unique Cultural Heritage Committee on Dec 7, 2017.
Indonesia
Inscribed in 2017 (12.COM) on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity
Pinisi, or the Art of Boatbuilding in South Sulawesi, refers to the rig and sail of the famed ‘Sulawesi schooner’. The construction and deployment of such vessels stand in the millennia-long tradition of Austronesian boatbuilding and navigation that has brought forth a broad variety of sophisticated watercrafts. For both the Indonesian and the international public, Pinisi has become the epitome of the Archipelago’s indigenous sailing craft. Today, the centres of boatbuilding are located at Tana Beru, Bira and Batu Licin, where about 70 per cent of the population make a living through work related to boatbuilding and navigation. Shipbuilding and sailing are not only the communities’ economic mainstay, however, but also the central focus of daily life and identity. The reciprocal cooperation between the communities of shipwrights and their relations with their customers strengthen mutual understanding between the parties involved. Knowledge and skills related to the element are passed down from generation to generation within the family circle, as well as to individuals outside of the family through the division of labour. The communities, groups and individuals concerned are actively involved in safeguarding efforts, for example through marketing initiatives and the publication of books on the subject.
Indonesian Wooden Boats Building website
The maritime history of traditional vessels in the Indonesian archipelago
The Pinisi is the largest type of the Bugis traditional wooden sailing schooner, and also the largest Indonesian traditional vessel, since the disappearance of the giant jong following the Dutch colonial occupation of Java.
The Javanese jong, or djong, was a type of ancient sailing ship originating from Java that was widely used by Javanese and Malay sailors. The word was and is spelled jong in its languages of origin, the "djong" spelling being the colonial Dutch romanisation.
Jongs were used mainly as seagoing passenger and cargo vessels. They traveled as far as Ghana, and even Brazil in ancient times. The average burthen was 4-500 tons, with a range of 85-700 tons. In the Majapahit era these vessels were used as warships, but still predominantly as transport vessels.
This is a model of a Javanese jong in the Maritime Museum in Singapore.
The Nusantara archipelago was known for production of these large jongs. A Portuguese account described how the Javanese people already had advanced seafaring skills when they arrived:
(The Javanese) are all men very experienced in the art of navigation, to the point that they claim to be the most ancient of all, although many others give this honor to the Chinese, and affirm that this art was handed on from them to the Javanese. But it is certain that they formerly navigated to the Cape of Good Hope and were in communication with the east coast of the island of San Laurenzo (Madagascar), where there are many brown and Javanized natives who say they are descended from them.
— Diogo de Couto, Decada Quarta da Asia
When the Portuguese captured Malacca, they recovered a chart from a Javanese pilot, Albuquerque said:...a large map of a Javanese pilot, containing the Cape of Good Hope, Portugal and the land of Brazil, the Red Sea and the Sea of Persia, the Clove Islands, the navigation of the Chinese and the Gom, with their rhumbs and direct routes followed by the ships, and the hinterland, and how the kingdoms border on each other. It seems to me. Sir, that this was the best thing I have ever seen, and Your Highness will be very pleased to see it; it had the names in Javanese writing, but I had with me a Javanese who could read and write. I send this piece to Your Highness, which Francisco Rodrigues traced from the other, in which Your Highness can truly see where the Chinese and Gores come from, and the course your ships must take to the Clove Islands, and where the gold mines lie, and the islands of Java and Banda, of actions of the period, than any of his contemporaries; and it appears highly probable, that what he has related is substantially true: but there is also reason to believe that he composed his work from recollection, after his return to Europe, and he may not have been scrupulous in supplying from a fertile imagination the unavoidable failures of a memory, however richly stored.
— Letter of Albuquerque to King Manuel I of Portugal, April 1512.
For seafaring, the Malay people independently invented junk sails, made from woven mats reinforced with bamboo, at least several hundred years before 1 BC. By the time of the Han dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD) the Chinese were using such sails, having learned it from Malay sailors visiting their Southern coast. Beside this type of sail, they also made balance lugsails (tanja sails). The invention of these types of sail made sailing around the western coast of Africa possible, because of their ability to sail against the wind.
Production of djongs ended in the 1700s, perhaps because of the decision of Amangkurat I of Mataram Sultanate to destroy ships on coastal cities and close ports to prevent them from rebelling. By 1677, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) reported that the Javanese no longer owned large ships and shipyards. When the VOC gained a foothold in Java, they prohibited the locals from building vessels more than 50 tons in tonnage and assigned European supervisors to shipyards.
The legal treatises on the freedom of the seas "De Indis" and "Mare Liberum"
Sekula, in FISH STORY, references a treatise by the Dutch Jurist Hugo Grotius.
The treatise was initially, but provisionally, drafted under the title De Indis (On the Indies). The events that formed the background to this legal argument and thesis are set out in the Wikipedia article on Grotius:
The war began when Grotius's cousin captain Jacob van Heemskerk captured a loaded Portuguese carrack merchant ship, Santa Catarina, off present-day Singapore in 1603. Heemskerk was employed with the United Amsterdam Company (part of the Dutch East India Company), and though he did not have authorization from the company or the government to initiate the use of force, many shareholders were eager to accept the riches that he brought back to them.
Not only was the legality of keeping the prize questionable under Dutch statute, but a faction of shareholders (mostly Mennonite) in the Company also objected to the forceful seizure on moral grounds, and of course, the Portuguese demanded the return of their cargo. The scandal led to a public judicial hearing and a wider campaign to sway public (and international) opinion. It was in this wider context that representatives of the Company called upon Grotius to draft a polemical defence of the seizure.
The result of Grotius' efforts in 1604/05 was a long, theory-laden treatise that he provisionally entitled De Indis (On the Indies). Grotius sought to ground his defense of the seizure in terms of the natural principles of justice. In this, he had cast a net much wider than the case at hand; his interest was in the source and ground of war's lawfulness in general. The treatise was never published in full during Grotius' lifetime, perhaps because the court ruling in favour of the Company preempted the need to garner public support.
In The Free Sea (Mare Liberum, published 1609) Grotius formulated the new principle that the sea was international territory and all nations were free to use it for seafaring trade.
Grotius' argument was that the sea was free to all, and that nobody had the right to deny others access to it. In chapter I, he laid out his objective, which was to demonstrate "briefly and clearly that the Dutch [...] have the right to sail to the East Indies", and, also, "to engage in trade with the people there". He then went on to describe how he based his argument on what he called the "most specific and unimpeachable axiom of the Law of Nations, called a primary rule or first principle, the spirit of which is self-evident and immutable", namely that: "Every nation is free to travel to every other nation, and to trade with it." From this premise, Grotius argued that this self-evident and immutable right to travel and to trade required (1) a right of innocent passage over land, and (2) a similar right of innocent passage at sea. The sea, however, was more like air than land, and was, as opposed to land, common property of all:
The air belongs to this class of things for two reasons. First, it is not susceptible of occupation; and second its common use is destined for all men. For the same reasons the sea is common to all, because it is so limitless that it cannot become a possession of any one, and because it is adapted for the use of all, whether we consider it from the point of view of navigation or of fisheries.Grotius, by claiming 'free seas' (Freedom of the seas), provided suitable ideological justification for the Dutch breaking up of various trade monopolies through its formidable naval power (and then establishing its own monopoly). England, competing fiercely with the Dutch for domination of world trade, opposed this idea and claimed in John Selden's Mare clausum (The Closed Sea):
"That the Dominion of the British Sea, or That Which Incompasseth the Isle of Great Britain, is, and Ever Hath Been, a Part or Appendant of the Empire of that Island."
As conflicting claims grew out of the controversy, maritime states came to moderate their demands and base their maritime claims on the principle that it extended seawards from land. A workable formula was found by Cornelius Bynkershoek in his De dominio maris (1702), restricting maritime dominion to the actual distance within which cannon range could effectively protect it. This became universally adopted and developed into the three-mile limit.
NOTE:
Giambattista Vico called Grotius, Selden and Samuel Pufendorf the "three princes" of the "natural right of the gentes". He went on to criticise their approach foundationally. In his Autobiography he specifies that they had conflated the natural law of the "nations", based on custom, with that of the philosophers, based on human abstractions. Isaiah Berlin comments on Vico's admiration for Grotius and Selden.
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