Thailand will be in crisis if flood management fails
- By N. Withitwinyuchon
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Xinhua, December 28, 2011
BUSINESS OPERATORS DEMAND CONCRETE STRATEGY
Following its investigation of the damage at flood hit industrial parks, Bank of Thailand's Office of Macroeconomics unveiled on Monday that majority of the investor hoped that the government would put effective flood prevention and water management measures into place as soon as possible.
About a week after scrapping the first lot of some 400 units, Honda Automobile Thailand Co., Ltd. again on Tuesday destroyed 1, 055 cars which were inundated by floods in mid-October to ensure its customers that the company will not reuse any parts of those affected cars. Car scraps were carried out at Rojana Industrial Park in Ayutthaya province which has a capacity to assemble 240, 000 cars a year and is the second-largest car factory in Thailand.
Despite its bad fortune, the company's executive pledged not to relocate it production plants to other countries. However, the company re-emphasized that the government should spare no effort to prevent great deluge from repeating.
"This measure will only correct the consequence. The government should look at the cause of the consequence, especially they should focus on water management in order to prevent the same disaster from happening again in the future," Pitak Pruittisarikorn, executive vice president of Honda Thailand, made the remarks regarding the 4-meter flood wall building plan around the industrial estate which the government proposed before.
Floodway projects along both sides of Chao Praya River are part of the long-term strategy the government has made clear so far, but still it lacks of details on exact locations and designs. The government plans to get the strategy implemented in the next one to three years but the question is that will it be in time?
If the inundation returns next year, even with lesser scale, while everything is not just yet ready, the private sector will definitely lose faith in the country, not just Yingluck administration. Not every business operator that is patient enough or dares enough to put its millions or billions invested factories at risk waiting until the government's strategies become effective. Sanyo Semiconductor Thailand, which has operated since 1990 producing semiconductors, transistors and large-scale integrated circuits, finally terminated operation of a flood-ravaged factory in Rojana Industrial Estate on Dec. 25.
"If the government cannot handle this and it comes again next year, we wouldn't be able to afford to stay in business. The government must work hard to restore confidence because we don't want to go through that again.. And we may consider moving out if the government fails to do so,"said a Japanese executive of a system engineering company in Bangkok.
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