Nicaragua raises and doubles. Indeed it triples and almost quadruples. In fact, the new artificial canal that will cross Central America will be more than three times longer than that of nearby Panama, connecting the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean: 278 km from Rio del Brito (ocean side) to Rio Punto Gorda, against the 77 km of the Panama Canal (and 163 km, 195 considering the access channels, of that of Suez).
The project was approved yesterday by the government of Nicaragua after meeting with the Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co (HKND Group), a Chinese company based in Hong Kong which has put almost 30 billion euros on the plate: that much will cost the great work, the work on which should begin in December of this year and be completed in 2019.
According to the engineers of HKND Group, a holding company headed by Chinese tycoon Wang Jing, former chairman of Xinwei Telecom Enterprise Group, navigation will not be possible before 2020, in what will be the largest waterway in Central America: between 230 and 520 meters wide, up to 28 meters deep. The numbers of the new infrastructure are certainly coveted by the trade: “The new channel – he explains Dong Yunsong, Chief Engineer of HKND – in fact, it will be able to support container ships and tankers weighing up to 400.000 tons; it will allow the transit of over 5 boats a year with an average journey time of 30 hours for each of them”.
However, we will have to overcome the resistance of ecologists, who are already on a war footing: according to the opponents of the project, the great risk is that of polluting Lake Nicaragua, which near the border with Costa Rica would be crossed by the artificial canal and is today a very important source of drinking water for Nicaragua. Then there is the fear for the conservation of the forest ecosystem and for the populations living in that area, given that 41 goods depots are planned along the route for an area involved - in addition to that of water - of 158 square kilometers .
In fact, the environmental impact of the work is not very light: it will require 190 megawatts of electricity, over 14 million tons of cement, 4,4 million tons of steel, 5,2 million tons of fuel and almost 150 million tons of sand and stones. In the face of this, as the Chinese company still recalls, “the canal will foster the creation of 3 jobs and add $25 billion in trade value by 2030”. More than double the 2012 GDP of the country of 6 million inhabitants, the largest geographically but also the poorest in Central America, with a gross domestic product five times lower than that of Costa Rica and Guatemala.
