Ecuador promotes a roadmap for the logistics sector

The Ministry of Production, Foreign Trade, Investment and Fisheries along with the Ministry of Transport and Public Works, in partnership with CAF -development bank of Latin America, are developing the Roadmap for the Logistics Sector in Ecuador, a management tool that will contribute, by national public and private consensus, to the adoption of the sustainable logistic model for Ecuador, which, in turn will allow for the consolidation of collaborative governance and the adoption of an agreed program with initiatives and priority actions to be carried out in the current legislation period.

As result of this work, the country will have a guide of projects and priority actions that are feasible to undertake and implement in the short-medium term, within a framework that recognizes Ecuador logistics challenges, consolidates its corridors and main nodes, and boosts the competitiveness of the most relevant production, consumption, and export chains.

Against this backdrop, a strategic workshop and 3 regional workshops were carried out in the cities of Quito, Cuenca and Guayaquil, with the participation of relevant public and private logistics entities.

During the last workshop in Guayaquil, Bernardo Requena, CAF representative in Ecuador, noted that large investments in infrastructure made by the Ecuador administration, such as road systems, require a logistics base that supports the private sector, taking advantage of the openness and coordination of the public sector. Likewise, he added that improving the export, control and development processes in technological platforms allows for the strengthening of the involved investors’ logistics institutions to achieve more powerful and effective production logistics relationships.

For his part, the Vice Minister of Promotion and Export, Roberto Intriago, said logistics is one of the main bases for improving trade and production relations. He added that a great effort has been made to raise the level of competitiveness, by identifying several pillars, such as logistics, entrepreneurship and human capital quality; factors that will help private companies to export their products within a broadly competitive market.

With the completion of the fourth workshop, approximately 200 players in public and private institutions have actively participated with their contributions and debates, thus allowing to identify the main concerns of the private sector and the main challenges of the public sector in the logistics field. Among the consensus, there are important issues such as the creation of a public-private body on logistics, the simplification of inspection procedures and processes, the upgrade of the transport fleet, the need to finish the high capacity road network, among others.

Also some concrete actions were identified which, according to Fausto Arroyo, Chief Executive of the CAF’s Sector Analysis and Programming Directorate, have been weighted by the workshop attendees based on the relevance, feasibility and urgency criteria. This criteria has also been categorized as high-, medium-, and low-impact vectors, according to the CAF’s logistics corridors of integration methodology, which focuses on the implementation of projects that are prioritized during the exercises.

In the next 3 weeks the final content of the roadmap will be agreed upon with the ministries and stakeholders, so that a document is created to gather, sum up, and set the priority actions to be implemented by the government in the current legislation to improve the logistics sector.