Ecuador’s Correa proposes trade route

BRASILIA, Brazil – Ecuador’s president-elect unveiled an ambitious and expensive idea Friday for a land-and-river trade route linking his country’s Pacific coast to Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, saying it could be an alternative to the Panama Canal.

The highway-waterway route would provide a corridor for Brazilian products such as soy, and a new route for Ecuador and Asia to send products to Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy.

Rafael Correa, a 43-year-old leftist economist, said the $2 billion project would pave or create roads, improve ports and dredge parts of a river in his own nation’s Amazon region. The project would link the Pacific to Brazil’s industrial jungle city of Manaus.

From Manaus, home to a free-trade manufacturing zone, goods could be sent on to the Atlantic Ocean along the Amazon River or by road to Venezuela’s Atlantic coast, Correa said.

“The advantage of this passage is that it avoids the Panama Canal, saving money,” Correa told reporters in Brazil’s capital of Brasilia.

Correa met with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and said he suggested that Brazil help finance the project.

Silva did not comment on the Amazon-Pacific proposal before leaving with Correa to attend a South American summit in Bolivia. But Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim called the cost “very high.”

Correa predicted that the project would end up costing less than $2 billion because port improvements are already planned for Ecuador’s port of Manta, where the trade route would begin.

Correa said the project’s cost was justified because it fits into the plans of a wave of new or newly re-elected left-leaning South American leaders dedicated to integrating the continent.

“This isn’t a project just for Brazil and Ecuador, it’s for South America and Latin America,” he said.

But the project would face huge economic, environmental and political hurdles, said Riordan Roett, a Latin American trade expert and director of Western Hemisphere studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Correa opposes a free trade agreement with Washington and has said he plans to exert more government control over Ecuador’s economy to close the nation’s deep divide between rich and poor. He takes office Jan. 15.