Posted on 06/07/2013 10:14:17 AM PDT by BBell
Nicaragua has awarded a Chinese company a 100-year concession to build an alternative to the Panama Canal, in a step that looks set to have profound geopolitical ramifications.
The president of the country's national assembly, Rene Nuñez, announced the $40bn (£26bn) project, which will reinforce Beijing's growing influence on global trade and weaken US dominance over the key shipping route between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
The name of the company and other details have yet to be released, but the opposition congressman Luis Callejas said the government planned to grant a 100-year lease to the Chinese operator.
The national assembly will debate two bills on the project, including an outline for an environmental impact assessment, on Friday.
Nicaragua's president, Daniel Ortega, said recently that the new channel would be built through the waters of Lake Nicaragua.
The new route will be a higher-capacity alternative to the 99-year-old Panama Canal, which is currently being widened at the cost of $5.2bn.
Last year, the Nicaraguan government noted that the new canal should be able to allow passage for mega-container ships with a dead weight of up to 250,000 tonnes. This is more than double the size of the vessels that will be able to pass through the Panama Canal after its expansion, it said.
According to a bill submitted to congress last year, Nicaragua's canal will be 22 metres deep and 286 km (178 miles) long - bigger than Panama and Suez in all dimensions.
Under the initial plans for the project, the government was expected to be the majority shareholder, with construction taking 10 years and the first ship passing through the canal within six years. It is unclear if this is still the case.
Two former Colombian officials recently accused China of influencing the international court of justice to
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
In an op-ed piece for the magazine Semana, Noemí Sanín, a former Colombian foreign secretary, and Miguel Ceballos, a former vice-minister of justice, said a Chinese judge had settled in Nicaragua's favour on a 13-year-old dispute over 75,000 square kilometres of sea.They said this took place soon after Nicaraguan officials signed a memorandum of understanding last September with Wang Jing, the chairman of Xinwei Telecom and president of the newly established Hong Kong firm HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Company, to build and operate the canal.
No conflict of interest there(sarc)
It would appear that our only counter to the Chinese would be to introduce either Islam or Liberalism to their culture - either of which will bring them back to the stone age.
And perhaps then we can convince them to take the Obamadork/felon/cretin off of our hands and let us get back to science, progress, and prosperity.
Logistically it looks like a smarter location than the present Panama canal
All we need to do is issue a stamp showing an erupting volcano next to where the canal would be! The Chinese will be so spooked, they will abandon the idea!
Hey, it worked once.
The Nicaragua route comes up every now and then. I remember in the 1960’s or 70’s there was discussion of using “atomic explosives” to clear a channel there.
This project would be far too expensive, and the route much longer and would require many more dams and locks, than the current canal. I can’t see that its construction would ever be economically viable.
With today’s modern machinery couldn’t they build one twice as wide and twice as deep in half the time?
22 metres deep? must be for subs.
I remember plans for this on the drawing board back in the early 70’s.
They were going to use nuclear devices to blast canals to the oceans from either side of Lake Managua.
Surprisingly the locals did not go for that.
But have they don’t and evironmental impact study? How many billion$ have we given them for this?
How so? I'm kinda scratching my head here.
I think another canal is an excellent idea. It'll provide the operators of the Panama Canal with an incentive to keep transit fees low. Whether the Chinese will ever recover their investment is another question. The Chinese bureaucrats running the project probably don't care - it's likely to be easier to skim large sums of money from foreign projects than from domestic ones.
That's how you handle Islamist.
I don’t think it can be done for $40B. That’s about what the “big dig” in Boston cost 10 years ago.
Nicaragua doesn’t have the infrastructure. That will have to be developed. Unlike Panama, Nicaragua is still a malaria-ridden jungle. That will have to be fixed.
This will take decades to complete. The political world will be very different in the meantime.
I predict that this will bankrupt Nicaragua, and after years of work, with lots of disease deaths, the project will remain unfinished.
How so? Because there is disputed land and sea involved with the operation and the Central and South Americans have a history of going to war over small bits of land.
It’s through Nicaragua, not Panama.
If there’s anyone left in central America who values their sovereignty they’d better step up to oppose this thing.
OTOH, if there was talk of building a competing canal, a wise company (or country) might get control of the project, trap the Nicaraguans in long-term contracts and never build it.
An alternative for the Chinese would be to build the new canal with the stipulation that operation would be controlled by the Chinese, just like Panama. I think they call that a Monopoly, don't they?
Costa Rica's a little over twice the size of NJ. For Costa Rica, there's no such thing as a small bit of land. Still, by abolishing its military, it's asking for trouble. Plenty of latter-day mini-Simon Bolivars in Latin America.
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