And while there are serious investors looking at the Port, who would under-write the massive costs associated with rowing the Tren Maya into Belize?
But, nonetheless, the idea remains live after recent discussions with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. And - in what we can only conclude is a fit of fantasy - the Prime Minister added that he believes PBL would be the ideal hub for it.
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"I know that when we met with Sheinbaum and Arevalo from Guatemala with discussions, as I pointed out to them, Belize alone can't build Tren Maya. It's going to be hundreds of millions of dollars to build it through Belize, but it has to be a regional consortium of private sector and public sector to be able to come together."
"Don't get excited. We have to do the studies here, IDB, I just spoke with Thomas from the IDB and he said they are prepared to be able to help to finance the study, to be able to see how best to position the Trenmaya and in our discussions there, then I realized that if we were to do that, the best place to make its main hub would be at the port of Belize because then we can move containers to Mexico and also to Guatemala because both of them need that extra service that they don't have."
"And then it goes on connecting to Guatemala. It's a long-term project, it's a visionary project, and again one of our biggest problems in Belize is we like to think small. We have to think big. We are not just 430,000, we are a market that has access to 200 million consumers and whenever I pitch to investors abroad and I tell them, listen, don't think Belize."
"If you want to invest in energy in Belize, don't think about energy for Belize connecting to the Central American grid. You know, we can sell energy into that grid. Right now Guatemala has put a bid for a billion megawatts of energy."
"We could produce it here and sell it into that grid. Mexico that have problems in meeting their demand. We could then not only buy from them but be able to sell. So we need to think big and see how we can get these things done."
"When you looked at what Adam Stewart said from Sandals, you know, in his presentation just now, he made the point that here you have Sandals, now, it's relatively small internationally in New Orleans, in the United States and so forth, 20,000 employers are still big. But they have managed to, as I said, about 80% of Americans know about Sandals. That's thinking big and that's what we have to do."
