Jamaica hopes to merge cargo port, Caymanas industrial projects
China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC), the Beijing-based firm that is contemplating expanding Kingston's trans-shipment port to accommodate mega ships, says it is waiting on the Jamaican Government to decide on the scope of the project to determine how, when and apparently in what form it can be done.
CHEC is already committed to a US$600-million investment that will complete a 50-mile highway - one section of which was already built by the French company Bouygues - linking Jamaica's commercial south coast to the tourist resorts on the north shore.
The Government has promoted the port project to take advantage of an expected increase in trans-shipment opportunities that will follow the expansion of the Panama Canal to allow the world's largest ships to traverse the isthmus between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
But CHEC spokesman Ricky Wang told journalists here Wednesday that while CHEC has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Port Authority of Jamaica (PAJ) - committing both sides to at least consider the feasibility of the project - the island's investment and commerce minister, Anthony Hylton, has floated the possibility of merging the port expansion and a proposed industrial/commercial zone on the Caymanas lands in St Catherine, just west of the capital, Kingston.
Hylton was in China recently pitching the idea to CHEC officials.
"We had very good discussions with the minister to combine the port and the Caymanas project," Wang, CHEC's deputy general manager for marketing, told reporters from Latin America and the Caribbean in a broad review of the company's projects in the western hemisphere.
CHEC has a portfolio of projects in the hemisphere, either in construction or under active consideration, of more than US$1.2 billion.
"We are waiting to see what (emerges)," said Wang, regarding Hylton's project combination idea. He said CHEC has already had several meetings with the PAJ, which, he indicated, "has many plans".
no design yet
However, given the broader ideas now on the table, Wang said, CHEC cannot "have a design for the project at this time".
That, it appears, means that there is no bill attached to the Caymanas project and how it is to be funded, although Wang indicated that all the issues were being aggressively pursued by CHEC's regional office in Kingston.
In its original form, the port expansion meant the construction of additional berths west of the trans-shipment facility's existing piers, incorporating a women's prison at Fort Augusta. Kingston Harbour, the world's seventh-largest natural harbour, would also be dredged.
CHEC would be responsible for the financing of the project under a build, own, operate, transfer (BOOT) arrangement, similar to its 50-year deal for the north-south toll road.
The Caymanas industrial/ commercial zone, initially slated for 200 acres of former sugar-cane land, but possibly expanding to 1,000 acres, was a separate scheme shopped around to Chinese investors by Karl Samuda, investment minister in the previous government that power nearly a year ago.
The economic zone, the CEZ, is one component of the master plan for the 10,700-acre Caymanas lands, which includes real-estate development and a potential rail link to the port.
Hylton has since embraced the CEZ project and now seems to think that it would be easier to find the financing for it by directly tying the development with the port expansion.
"They want CHEC to be involved," said Wang.
