By Brendon Beliku
Brendon Beliku is a Regional Corporate Mobility Coordinator for an international corporate immigrationfirm specializing in East Malaysian immigration regulatory compliance. He is also an independent public policy analyst.
KOTA KINABALU: When State Assemblyman (ADUN) for Tanjong Papat, Alex Thien, recently urged local entrepreneurs to break free from traditional fishing and establish a premium, globally recognised Sabah seafood brand inSandakan, he diagnosed a profound macro economic truth: “abundance without identity leads to resource exploitation by external markets”.
Sandakan possesses a world class marine ecosystem; undoubtedly, it remains functionally invisible on the global value map.
However, building an international brand is not a rhetorical exercise, nor can it be achieved through marketing campaigns alone. Brand equity is the mirror image of logistical capability. A world class sea food brand cannot survive on a third world logistics grid.
For decades, Sabah’s transport infrastructure has been structurally engineered for ‘extraction’,systematically designed to siphon raw, low margin commodities out of our borders while foreign economies pocket the lucrative downstream processing margins.
To realise Thien’s vision of anindustrialised, value-added fisheries sector, our developmental advocacy must undergo a radical shift: “we must dismantle the legacy extractive pipeline and replace it with a model of facilitative cold chainmobility”
The Anatomy of the Extractive PipelineTo understand why Sandakan has failed to develop a signature seafood brand despite its marine wealth, one must examine the physical geometry of its transport networks.
Historically, colonial and post-colonial infrastructure spending in East Malaysia has favored a linear, extractive model. Roads, ports and logisticshubs were built to move bulk assets (i.e., timber, crude palm oil and unprocessed raw materials from theinterior or the coastline directly to deep water ports for immediate exit). In this extractive paradigm, logistics is treated as a passive byproduct of transit rather than an activedriver of industrial processing. Raw fish and crab are harvested, dumped onto docks, packed inrudimentary ice crates and immediately loaded onto cargo vessels bound for processing hubs inPeninsular Malaysia, Singapore or East Asia.
The consequences are economically devastating. Sabah absorbs the environmental and ecological costs ofresource extraction, while the multi-billion dollar downstream equity (e.g. the pasteurisation, flashfreezing, vacuum packaging, brand creation and global marketing), is captured entirely by externaljurisdictions.
We are running a colonial-era resource economy in a twenty-first century globalised market.Breaking the Calcification: From Inertia to Facilitative MobilityTo become a high margin processing powerhouse, Sabah must shatter the “institutional calcification” ofits infrastructure.
Transit networks must serve internal economic aggregation, not raw extraction. Thisrequires a high velocity ecosystem linking fisherfolk, aquaculture, processing hubs and global gateways.A feat impossible if administrative enclaves remain isolated.
Thien’s coalition across Tanjong Papat, Elopura, Karamunting, Sungai Sibuga, Gum-Gum and Sekong isstructurally critical because industrial supply chains do not respect municipal borders.
Karamunting’sports, Elopura’s commercial core and the aquaculture zones of Gum-Gum and Sekong must operate asone. Fragmented transport policies will instantly stall this ecosystem.
A unified regional transit grid isnon-negotiable to route diverse catches into centralized hubs before quality degrades.
The Cold Chain Corridor as an Industrial Enabler Unbroken cold chain infrastructure is a non-negotiable asset for Sabah’s economic transformation, aspremium seafood branding relies entirely on preserving biochemical integrity from harvest to transit.
However, this downstream industrial transition is directly threatened by a systemic, governance-driven collapse at Sabah’s freight gateways.
At the Sapangar Bay Container Port (SBCP), operational inefficiencies and poor landside planning havecaused average vessel waiting times to skyrocket from under 9 hours in mid-2025 to a staggering 29 hoursby March 2026, with standard lay times bloating from 5 to 13 days.
For a perishable economy, theseprotracted bottlenecks act as an absolute death sentence, while aggressive congestion surcharges andskyrocketing haulage fees completely obliterate the thin profit margins of local processing startups.
As highlighted by logistics expert Datuk Ts Dr. Hj Ramli Amir, Vice-President of CILT International forSoutheast Asia, resolving this crisis requires abandoning isolated, incremental fixes in favor of anaggressive state demand for an integrated transport master plan.
This comprehensive framework mustshift the perception of cold storage from an isolated private asset to a core public utility, aligning portdevelopment, regional industrial zones, road networks and decentralised, solar-backed collection hubsinto a coherent multimodal network.
By synchronising dedicated refrigerated freight lines with highly efficient sea and air gateways, Sabah canovercome chronic logistics driven inflation and prevent repeated port paralysis.
Ultimately, establishing these world class logistics corridors is the only way Sabah can secure its attractiveness as an investment destination and successfully scale a globally competitive brand.Overcoming the Gateway Bottleneck Finally, putting Sandakan seafood on the international map requires conquering the final mile of mobility:‘global gateway access’.
To capture premium international markets, fresh and high-end processed seafood requires high-frequency, reliable air freight capabilities and rapid seaport turn around times.
Currently, Sabah’s international air cargo connectivity remains highly centralised through external hubs,introducing costly delays and multiple handling points that jeopardize perishable goods.
To truly democratize global market access for local entrepreneurs, state advocacy must aggressively target transport policy autonomy.
We must expand cold chain cargo handling capabilities at Sandakan Airportand optimise maritime port logistics to accommodate just-in-time logistics models.
The call to transition Sandakan into a major hub for seafood processing is an essential blueprint foreconomic self-determination. But we cannot build a world class brand on third world logistics corridors.
If we want local entrepreneurs to successfully move into processing, packaging and marketing, we must provide them with the physical infrastructure that makes those industries viable. It is time to move pastthe era of raw extraction.
By investing in “facilitative cold chain mobility” and integrating our regionaltransport networks, we can ensure that the true value of Sabah’s resources is captured, processed andretained where it belongs: ‘right here in Sabah’.
