By Datuk Ts Dr. Hj Ramli Amir, former President of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT) Malaysia and Vice-President of CILT International for Southeast Asia
KOTA KINABALU: Sabah should establish an Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) anchored on its east coast (Sandakan–Lahad Datu–Tawau–Kalabakan) as a spatial, crossborder growth zone that plugs directly into BIMPEAGA and wider East Asia value chains. This would complement, not duplicate, the existing Sabah Development Corridor (SDC) by specifically opening the eastern frontier toward Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Mindanao, Papua New Guinea, Northern Australia and key Northeast Asian markets.
Strategic context: Sabah in BIMPEAGA and East Asia
Sabah already sits at the heart of BIMPEAGA, a subregional initiative created to accelerate development in remote and lagging regions of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
The BIMPEAGA area covers Sabah, Sarawak, Labuan, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Maluku, Papua, Mindanao, and Palawan, linking more than 70 million people across maritime Southeast Asia. Under its new strategy, BIMPEAGA is shifting from transportonly corridors to broader spatial economic corridors that integrate infrastructure, production centers, and value chains.
One of these, the East Borneo Economic Corridor (EBEC), explicitly includes Sabah alongside Kalimantan and parts of Southern Philippines as a future logistics, clean energy, and halal trade hub.
In parallel, East Asia’s regional integration continues to deepen through complex production networks and supply chain fragmentation, with East Asia leading in intraregional trade and investment flows.
Positioning Sabah’s east coast as a dedicated Eastern Economic Corridor would connect local industries to these East Asian networks, leveraging proximity to shipping routes and Indonesia’s new capital in Kalimantan. Existing Malaysian economic corridors such as the East Coast Economic Region (ECER) on Peninsular Malaysia demonstrate how corridorbased planning can drive balanced regional growth and attract private investment.
Sabah can adapt these lessons to its own eastern seaboard, focusing on crossborder rather than purely domestic integration.
Why an Eastern Economic Corridor for Sabah?
The Sabah Development Corridor (SDC) launched in 2008 to diversify the state’s economy, improve infrastructure, and attract investment, with SEDIA as the implementing authority.
However, SDC’s agenda and investments have been more concentrated around urban and western/central zones, while the east coast and land borders remain comparatively underleveraged in terms of highvalue, exportoriented clusters.
At the same time, ADB and BIMPEAGA are reconfiguring subregional corridors, including a planned East Economic Corridor (EC4), to better reach marginalized areas and spread the gains of integration.
Sabah’s eastern frontier is precisely the type of area these new spatial corridors are designed to activate, given its resource base, border locations, and existing but underutilized ports.
The state government is already investing in key nodes such as CIQS complexes at SerudongKalabakan and BantulPagalungan, as well as CIQS facilities at Lahad Datu Port to facilitate trade and mobility with Southern Philippines and Kalimantan.
These projects signal a policy intention to open the eastern frontier and can serve as anchor infrastructure for a formal Eastern Economic Corridor framework. Meanwhile, Sabah’s overall strategic plan emphasizes its role as a logistics and coldchain hub for a potential market of nearly 80 million people linked to Indonesia’s new capital and BIMPEAGA hinterlands.
An EEC would consolidate these scattered initiatives into a coherent, branded, and investable region with clear sectoral focus and governance.
Key development pillars for the Eastern frontier
An Eastern Economic Corridor for Sabah should rest on several mutually reinforcing pillars aligned with BIMPEAGA’s strategic focus on connectivity, agribusiness, tourism, environment, and sociocultural cooperation.
Connectivity and logistics:
Upgrade and integrate east coast ports (Sandakan, Lahad Datu, Tawau) as a subregional logistics and coldchain hub serving EBEC and broader BIMPEAGA.
Operationalize and expand CIQS facilities at SerudongKalabakan, BantulPagalungan, and Lahad Datu to enable seamless land–sea trade corridors with Kalimantan and Southern Philippines.
Prioritize multimodal connections (road, air, sea) to link interior production zones to gateway ports, following corridor best practices seen in Thailand’s Eastern Economic Corridor and Malaysia’s ECER.
Crossborder agribusiness and halal industries:
Leverage BIMPEAGA’s emphasis on agribusiness to build integrated crossborder value chains in palm oil, cocoa, fisheries, seaweed, and highvalue agroproducts.
Use EBEC’s identified potential for halalcertified goods to develop an eastcoast halal industrial belt tied into markets in Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei, and onward to East Asia.
Position Lahad Datu–Tawau as a regional hub for coldchain logistics and food security for the 79.8 millionstrong regional market highlighted in SDC planning.
Energy and green growth:
Build on proposals such as an East Coast Energy Economic Corridor centered on Sandakan, Lahad Datu, and Tawau to attract clean energy investments.
Align with BIMPEAGA’s environment pillar by promoting renewable energy, lowcarbon industrial zones, and sustainable land use along the corridor.
Explore crossborder power exchanges or green hydrogen/ammonia supply chains for East Asia markets through EBEC’s clean energy focus.
Tourism and sociocultural linkages:
Use BIMPEAGA initiatives like Sister Tourism Villagesand cruise tourism to knit together coastal and island destinations between Sabah, Southern Philippines, and Kalimantan.
Combine ecotourism, communitybased tourism, and heritage routes to ensure the corridor’s growth is inclusive and culturally grounded.
Capitalize on recent Sabah–regional airline partnerships aimed at improving air connectivity with Brunei and BIMPEAGA markets to feed traffic to eastern destinations.
Governance, institutions, and policy alignment
Malaysia already uses corridorbased authorities such as ECERDC and SEDIA to coordinate multisector development programs at regional scale. An Eastern Economic Corridor in Sabah could be structured as a subregion under SDC, with a specific mandate to plan, promote, and monitor the east coast and border districts within the BIMPEAGA/EBEC framework.
The Asian Development Bank is currently undertaking a study on BIMPEAGA economic corridors to assess existing performance and recommend strategies for optimizing growth and sectoral focus. Sabah should proactively align its EEC concept and projects with the outcomes of this ADB study to secure technical and financial support.
At policy level, the corridor concept can strengthen Sabah’s case in federal planning documents and national corridor strategies by showing how east coast investments contribute to national goals of balanced development and ASEAN integration. It can also provide a structured platform for crossborder MOUs on trade facilitation, security cooperation, and tourism with Mindanao, North Kalimantan, and Brunei under BIMPEAGA. Clear institutional arrangements, including a dedicated corridor committee and public–private task forces, will be crucial to mobilize private sector participation, which BIMPEAGA regards as its primary engine of growth.
Concluding case for opening the Eastern frontier
An Eastern Economic Corridor would transform Sabah’s east coast from a relatively peripheral zone into a frontline interface with the wider BIMPEAGA and East Asian economy.
By clustering infrastructure, industry, and policy interventions along key nodes such as Sandakan, Lahad Datu, Tawau, and Kalabakan, Sabah can better capture trade, investment, and tourism flows that currently bypass its eastern seaboard.
The corridor model allows Sabah to leverage ongoing regional processes—the reconfiguration of BIMPEAGA corridors, Indonesia’s capital relocation, and East Asia’s deepening production networks—rather than pursuing isolated, projectbyproject strategies. For Malaysia as a whole, an energized Eastern frontier in Sabah would strengthen national connectivity to Borneo, narrow intrastate disparities, and reinforce the country’s role as a bridge between ASEAN’s maritime and continental subregions.
