And one of the biggest investments on deck for the government of Belize is the conversion of the Port of Belize into a modernized cruise and bulk cargo port. It's being touted as a 400 million US dollar project. He gave us an update on how that's going.
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"I think it's an exciting project. We know that we had a sord history with the Port of Belize and the previous group that had it under receivership, they were not investing. They were taking what money is to supposedly pay loans and that sort of a matter."
"We felt that we were being held hostage because they did not get the ESIA approval and so they said we felt that no investments were being done. So we felt that the best thing is to be able to negotiate."
"Unlike what the previous government did to just strong arm things and you end up paying a lot more, we negotiated and we negotiated hard and we bought the port. I think we paid about 190 million dollars and once we got that then we said no we need to modernize it, we need a cruise port."
"As I pointed out the container port the equipment is more than 50 years old that has outlived its life and so we need to modernize it and so what we've been doing since then we made a study, we took it to cabinet, everything is decided by the cabinet."
"I made a paper to present that paper to cabinet as to what position do we want to do only a container port, only a cruise port of both of them and the cabinet said in their wisdom that we need to do both and so now you come up to an estimate. It is estimated around 140 million US dollars and then after that we work on the on a master plan that was presented to cabinet. The cabinet has accepted the master plan. We started to meet with potential investors like SSA Marine from Blackrock, the company is owned by Blackrock in the United States."
"We have global ports holding from Turkey. Both of these companies have been building ports not only in the US but also in the region and internationally so these are bonafide investors that will come in."
"We've been talking, trying to prepare to do the dredging and so this time around what we've decided to do is to the excess material that we can't use. We're going to build these what you call mangrove forests 400, pretty much about 400 acres of mangrove."
"Its not going to be one of 400 but small islands that will cover about 400 acres and to plant mangrove in it? It has been done I think it is in Paraguay in South America successfully so we want to replicate that and that will be able to address that issue of what you're going to do with all of that excess material."
