Pakistan took an important step towards the realisation of its dream to serve as the region's commercial hub when the Karachi Port Trust and a Hong Kong based company, Hutchinson Port Holdings (HPH), singed an agreement in Islamabad on Thursday for the construction of a deep sea container terminal at Karachi port.
As President General Pervez Musharraf explained in his speech at the signing ceremony, the plan includes the setting up of facilities for shipbuilding and repair at the other deep sea port in Gwadar. This would place Pakistan, in three to four years' time, in the company of a few countries of the region which provide shipbuilding and repair facilities as well as deep sea container handling.
The new facility will have ten berths spread over a 5 km area, which would be ready to handle the first vessel sailing into the Karachi port by 2010. It will be linked to other parts of the country and the region beyond via rail and road links. Also on the drafting board is a cargo village to provide the necessary services for the shipping traffic.
Understandably, Pakistan's immediate goal is to serve as a transport corridor for the resource-rich and land-locked Central Asian Republics. It also hopes to provide a shorter and relatively less expensive route to western China to bring in oil and gas from not only the Middle East but also Africa. Once the activity gets going, it would help attract more and more transshipment traffic like UAE's Jebel Ali port, which has made the Emirate a leading commercial hub, linking Europe and Asia.
Notably, UAE is a major importer of all sorts of goods and materials by its sea and air services that are destined for other countries, but yield a huge amount of revenue from the facilities its ports offer. Same is the case with Singapore's deep-sea port, which has the distinction of being the world's busiest port. A tiny island state, Singapore hardly has any natural economic resources of its own. Yet it is famous the world over as a commercial centre and tourist attraction. It has earned that position through imaginative use of its seaport's location. Singapore port now handles a quarter of the world's container ship traffic; and half of the international supply of crude oil passes through it. No wonder it prides itself in being world's the busiest transshipment port.
The shipping activity generates numerous other economic opportunities. Like UAE, Singapore is a major exporter of goods and products. It serves mainly as a services centre, re-exporting its imports. That has helped it to enter the manufacturing sector in a big way, creating jobs and prosperity for its population.
The point of quoting these examples, of course, is that if these tiny and resource strapped states can emerge as major centres of commercial activity on the global level, Pakistan with its substantial natural resources, population, and strategic location can do a lot better than that. Our policy makers, cognisant of the country's geo-strategic location, are already working along the desired lines. A roadmap in the form of the country's dream of acting as a link between Central Asia and the rest of the world at large is already there.
So are the deep-sea ports at Gwadar and the proposed container terminal at the Karachi port along with the necessary infrastructure of roads and railways as well as storage facilities. What we also need is to start thinking of the next phase of making use of the commodities and raw materials that are to pass through our ports so as to manufacture new goods and products for domestic as well as foreign markets.
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