11 April 2024 (Lloyd's List) - ANOTHER attempt is being made to relocate Bangkok port out of the congested city, as Thailand’s recently elected prime minister Srettha Thavisin tries to make his mark within his first year of leadership.
Yet the relocation is already being postponed inside the Thai government, with Ministry of Transport officials suggesting that only half the port may be moved.
Talk of redeveloping the land Thailand’s first modern international trade port occupies has been swirling for almost a decade.
As recently as 2019, the Port of Authority of Thailand had planned to speed up development of the nearby Laem Chabang port and build apartment buildings and shopping malls in the Klong Toei area (where Bangkok port is located; it is popularly known as Khlong Toei port), one of the city’s biggest and oldest slums.
After a recent Cabinet meeting, Srettha once again proposed the redevelopment of the port as part of a national move to reduce pollution in major cities.
Consequently, a letter was sent to the Ministry of Transport, PAT, the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority and other related agencies to conduct an immediate study about moving the port out of the Klong Toei area, while coming up with a comprehensive redevelopment plan for the area.
The justification being used this time is to reduce congestion and pollution from freight movements at the port. The National Economic and Social Development Council reported that more than 10m cases of pollution-related diseases in 2023.
As recently as February of this year, workers in Bangkok were told to work from home as pollution levels reached 15 times the level recommended by the World Health Organisation.
Yet officially relocating the port would be unlikely to solve the problem, because traffic would most likely be shunted to the many private terminals operating on the Chao Phraya river.
Asian shipping expert and Linerlytica founder Tan Hua Joo said: “Klong Toei handled 1.2m teu of import/export containers in 2023, while other private wharves on the Chao Phraya river handled a further 500,000 teu.
“It does not make sense for the port to be partially shut because there is still very high demand from the port users, especially the shipping lines on the intra-Asia routes.”
Within a day, the proposal was already being walked back, with the Ministry of Transport suggesting that the relocation might only involve half the port owing to issues with residual land leases.
Monporn Charoensri, deputy minister of transport and the government official supervising the Port of Authority of Thailand, said other agencies raised these concerns and this resulted in a change of plan to move only some parts of the port and turn the resulting free space into public parks for the city’s residents.
