ASEAN LAND BRIDGES & RAILWAY SYSTEM

Interconnecting ASEAN member countries via landbridge cum railway project has become an urgent need. It is viable. This article is hereby republished to stress that point.

ASEAN LAND BRIDGES & RAILWAY SYSTEM

Erle Frayne Argonza y Delago

Magandang umaga sa lahat! Good morning to everyone!

This analyst will continue on the ASEAN theme and will focus on road networks & railways for this piece. The region is now preparing the foundations for its conversion into an economic union by 2015, so it would be a productive engagement for citizens of the region to put forward their ideas about how to let the region grow and prosper, such as the idea about land bridges articulated here.

Each member country of ASEAN is now developing infrastructures at different paces, thus rendering each country with gaps in terms of road networks and railways. Such I gap, I believe, can be narrowed if the entire region will conceptualize, design, and begin laying down today the foundations of a region-wide road network.

The grand project can be dubbed as ‘land bridges program’ for the goal it can aspire to attain: that of linking all of the member countries into interfacing and interloping highways. There will be defining expressways in each of the countries that will then be integrated, expanded, and closed gap where certain spaces lack them, thus creating a seamless expressway serving as ‘land bridges’ across the entire region.

Running parallel or inter-linked with the road network would be a gargantuan railway system—of maglev technology—that will be part of the land bridging efforts. Transport hubs can be constructed in certain areas where the road facilities and railway can interface. Each member country can choose to link up its railways (running on electricity and diesel) with the regional maglev to comprise a yet another complex network with awesome potency for stimulating growth.

Such a grand project, which when interlinked further with the Mekong integrated project, will serve as multiplier effect in stimulating growth and development for all of the member countries without exception. The flow of peoples, goods and services, and investments across borders will thus increase by many folds, propelling further the generation of wealth for the union.

With the ASEAN central bank and ASEAN development bank running by 2015 and onwards, it becomes facile to fund the gargantuan land bridges project. The implementers will include private construction & development companies in the region as well as banks that can fund the project’s phases from the side of the private builder-constructors.

The project will enhance the synergy of trucking, train, and shipping down the ground and waters. Such effectively done, there will then be a reduction of moving people and goods by airplanes that can then have greater space for mobility.

The land bridges project can spur more ambitious civil engineering, so that civil works can move on to build tunnels beyond 2 kilometers below the ground. The same engineering efforts can then build tunnels across islands and help to ease out the burdens on ships as the link between island components of the road network.

The same project can also facilitate the inter-connection of the ASEAN to a new ‘silk route’ now rising across the Asian continent. The entry points will be India and China, which the union can cooperate with in building linking infrastructures. With such a possibility turned into reality, one can travel by road and trains from Luzon in the Philippines onwards to the Europe, permitting enjoyment of wonderful landscapes across many lands.

Movements of peoples, goods and services to and from the giant neighbors will also move up by many folds with the land bridge project linked up with the ‘silk route’. Ships and planes can be unburdened a bit by such a twist of development, and can then accommodate more goods & services for other continents and regions.

Regional institutions can be erected to design, manage, and regulate the conduct of construction as well as future traffic along the expressways and the railways flows. There should be transparency and efficiency in the bidding of contracts, so that early enough the governance components of the future political union can already be erected.

It is very likely that the project will be highly welcomed by the peoples of the region. The business sector, notably the constructors & developers, could hardly wait to dip their hands into it as soon as the call for participation by the ASEAN will be in place. It will surely leapfrog the region’s catching up with the developed world and with China, rendering it a potential global economic power in the foreseeable future.

[Philippines, 11 November 2010]

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Come Visit E. Argonza’s blogs & website anytime!

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PROF. ERLE FRAYNE ARGONZA: http://erleargonza.com

ASIAN ECONOMIC POWERS BETTER BUILD THE ‘NEW SILK ROAD’

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

The recent finalization of the 450-kph bullet train of China is among the top great news showing the positive, constructive life going on in Asia. Such a life has been led by the ‘emerging markets’ of the continent and seconded by the ‘dragon economies’. Altogether, the economic powers of the region are exhibiting to the world what is meant by the idiom ‘truly human’: constructive, cooperative, life-giving.

Now that Asia’s powers have shown that Asians are indeed humans—and not those “halfway between monkey and man” as imperialist White racists once regarded them—it is time to interconnect the whole of Asia via a New Silk Road. That ‘silk road’ could later interconnect with Africa and Europe, but first of all the priority must be to interconnect Asia in order to catalyze synergy and complete the development goals of all member countries of the continent.

The Old Silk Road once linked the Middle Kingdom, at one time the greatest civilization on Earth (circa 600-900 Before present), to the countries west of it, all through the Persian dominions and Arab dominions, and onwards to Byzantium and the Balkans. Ceaseless warring by the abominations of Europe—the mercantile and oligarchic powers of Venice and Normandy on top of the list—closed that road forever.

Those ignominious Dark Ages are way behind us now, though a new Dark Age is now enveloping the planet through the latest destructive pursuits of the Anglo-European oligarchy. Before the Dark Age would come to fruition, it would be best for Asians to bond together, exhibit cooperation and synergy, and build the New Silk Road.

In today’s context, a ‘silk road’ would comprise of a mesh of interconnecting roads, shipping lanes, and railways. Island Southeast Asia, among the dynamic economies of ASEAN, would benefit immensely from this new form of ‘silk route’ that interconnects roads, ships, and railways.

The prototypes of new bullet trains and maglevs should immediately be erected down the ground, while the stakeholders of Asia talk with each other to map out the Silk Road Plan and implement them phase by phase. ASEAN, India, China, Pakistan, South Korea, Japan would in the best position to lead the talks, both on bilateral and multilateral arrangements. Other countries, such as Nepal, Mongolia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, would follow suit the moment that the talks would yield actual results towards an integrated inter-looping Silk Road for the entire continent.

Surely a Damocles sword hangs by the planet today, threatening to unleash terrible woes as weapons of mass destruction will pummel and destroy nations in a new global conflagration. Needless to say, the Western powers are the ones orchestrating the compass towards this new Dark Age, sick as they are with the polarized minds they inherited from their ancestors.

But it’s never too late to decelerate the forces leading to the new Dark Age, and nothing can stop those forces better than Asia. And I would say boldly, that the New Silk Road will be among the best means or strategies to bring a new Age of Hope to planet Earth, humans, flora, fauna and resource endowments.

[Philippines, 07 May 2011]

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Come Visit E. Argonza’s blogs & website anytime!

Social Blogs:

IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com

UNLADTAU: http://unladtau.wordpress.com

Wisdom/Spiritual Blogs:

COSMICBUHAY: http://cosmicbuhay.blogspot.com

BRIGHTWORLD: http://erlefraynebrightworld.wordpress.com

Poetry & Art Blogs:

ARTBLOG: http://erleargonza.wordpress.com

ARGONZAPOEM: http://argonzapoem.blogspot.com

Mixed Blends Blogs:

@MULTIPLY: http://efdargon.multiply.com

@FRIENDSTER: http://erleargonza.blog.friendster.com

@SOULCAST: http://www.soulcast.com/efdargon

Website:

PROF. ERLE FRAYNE ARGONZA: http://erleargonza.com

US WATCH: TRANSPORT U.S. BACK TO PROSPERITY

Erle Frayne Argonza y Delago

The final feature of the US ‘real economy’ worth featuring is transportation & communications. This is among the most productive sectors that produce real wealth, contrasted to the ‘casino economy’ of predatory finance that produces wealth from out of wealth itself, producing really nothing worth our value. Broad as it is, let me focus on the transport sector.

Time was when the railway industry took off, inducing growth as soon as the railways hit the West. The continental divide among the US states was bridged quickly, intra-trade exponentially increased. Soon enough, foreign trade also increased in leaps and bounds as maritime shipping grew and matured quickly, making US articles of trade be exported to all corners of the planet.

Trains, ships, airplanes, automotives, trucks, heavy equipment, tractors, and other state-of-the art prototypes came out of America’s workshops to propel growth not only in the US but in other countries as well. “Made in the USA” products became household words everywhere, including my Wild Wild West province of Cagayan in Northern Philippines, precisely due to the miracle of the transport sector that was broadly a facet of the ‘real economy’ of America. I was a child in the 1960s and early 70s when the “Made in the USA” was chic and almost a cult-level cliché.

That era now is now consigned to the dustbins of a remote past. Sure, America still produces state-of-the art transport prototypes. But look, railways have stagnated (is there a mag-lev there now?), automotives are shrinking by the day (laying off and displacing thousands of top quality industrial technicians), while the cutting edge technology for almost all prototypes, save for military transport, have already been surpassed by Asia.

McCain and Obama should better do their homework and understand the catastrophic future that awaits America if the transport sector remains neglected and ceaselessly ravaged inch-by-inch by the infernal fires of predatory finance. The policy makers there better salve the ailing sector quickly, and get back those laid-off topnotch industrial technicians to work before they lose every iota of motivation to even get involved in the sector they grew up with but which rejected them (how traumatic!).

If there’s any sector to begin with, it’s railways. Better renovate the railways, and establish maglevs in all the major continental routes of the US. And quickly take the initiative to establish cross-border maglevs with Canada and Mexico. Later, establish maglevs connecting Alaska with Russia via Siberia, thus connecting US to the Asian land mass.

Sorry for sounding ‘interventionist’, fellows in America. We Asians are as concerned with your economy as you are, and we would want your economic leadership to again rise to the fore. If America does that, other nations will then move on, propelled by growth in the ‘real economy’ because America is doing so. Failing to do that, the economic baton will transfer to Asia, and it will crash our hearts to see our fellow Earthans of America sinking in esteem by the day, because of their collapsing prosperity.

We are all siblings on Earth, this is certain, that’s why we share words of wisdom about your economic conditions. May you finally have a reform-oriented President comes this coming electoral contest.

[Writ 07 June 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila]