22/04/2026
If you want to know why food and basic goods in the Philippines are so suffocatingly expensive, you have to look at the water, not the land. We are an archipelago of 7,000 islands, yet we have made it mathematically punishing to move goods between them. 🚢📉
This is the catastrophic reality of the "Cabotage Law" and the Domestic Shipping Cartel.
In the Philippines, it is often significantly cheaper to ship a container of goods from Manila to Shenzhen, China, than it is to ship that exact same container from Manila to Mindanao.
Why? Because Philippine law historically mandates that only domestically registered, Filipino-owned shipping lines are allowed to transport cargo between our local ports. Foreign mega-carriers are banned from competing in our domestic waters.
The political justification was "protecting local industries and national security." But in economic reality, it created a massive, uncompetitive oligopoly.
Because local shipping oligarchs face zero international competition, they have absolutely no incentive to lower their prices, modernize their aging fleets, or improve their excruciatingly slow logistics. They operate a captive market.
Every single time you buy groceries in Cebu, or construction materials in Davao, you are paying a massive, hidden "inefficiency tax" to subsidize a few politically protected shipping billionaires in Manila. Until we fully liberalize our waters and force local lines to compete globally, our geography will remain our greatest economic disadvantage.
