China's Building a Huge Canal in Nicaragua, But We Couldn't Find It
China's Building a Huge Canal in Nicaragua, But We Couldn't Find It
“I’m very skeptical,” says COA's Eric Farnsworth pointing out to the massive engineering and environmental challenges to overcome to build the canal.
Deep on the southeastern side of Lake Nicaragua, along a bumpy dirt road that climbs gently through lush-green forest, sits the tiny town of El Tule. It is quintessential rural Central America: Chickens roam outside tin-roofed homes while pigs stand tied to trees, awaiting slaughter; the sound of drunk locals singing along to ranchera music greeted visitors on a recent weekend afternoon.
The village, if you listen to Nicaraguan officials, is a key point in what will be the biggest infrastructure project the region has ever seen, the construction of a $50 billion canal slated to run 170 miles from the country’s east to west coast. Awarded two years ago by President Daniel Ortega to an obscure Chinese businessman named Wang Jing, the concession calls for El Tule to be ripped up, erased essentially, in order to make way for the canal right before it plunges into the lake and then meets the Pacific Ocean a few miles later....
...However, for a project that made so little sense to so many skeptics from the very beginning, the almost non-existent initial progress — along with the struggles to raise financing — is only fanning those doubts.
Sverre Svenning, a shipping expert at Oslo-based Fearnley Consultants AS, notes that Panama’s current $5 billion canal expansion will allow it to better accomodate today’s bigger tankers. Overall traffic, he says, isn’t strong enough to sustain a second route. And then there are the massive engineering and environmental challenges to overcome, like making sure the country’s volcanos don’t disrupt the canal, according to Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas. “I’m very skeptical,” he said....
