Black Immigrant Daily News

The 20,132 signatures gathered so far in a petition to prevent the approval of the Waterloo cruise and cargo port development project were presented to the Minister of Sustainable Development by Thomas Greenwood, a supporter of the Feinstein group’s Port Coral cruise port development, which was approved several years ago and is nearing completion.

by Marco Lopez

BELIZE CITY, Thurs. Sept. 1, 2022

No to Waterloo—it is a position being taken by 20,132 Belizean citizens who have so far signed an ongoing petition to put a stop to the unrelenting efforts of Waterloo Investment Holdings to build a cruise terminal and expand the cargo facilities at the Port of Belize Limited compound in Belize City—despite a denial of the company’s request for project approval by the National Environmental Appraisal Committee (NEAC) in 2021 due to unanswered questions related to the project, and grave environmental and social concerns. The petition was submitted to the Minister of Sustainable Development, Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management, Hon. Orlando Habet, yesterday by Thomas Greenwood, president emeritus of the Federation of Cruise Tourism Associations of Belize (FECTAB).

Greenwood, after presenting the petition, stated, “From Punta Gorda to Corozal, from Cayo to the cayes, it was countrywide, and what really sent me into a state of pleasant shock was the reaction of people. There’ll be naysayers, there’ll be those who say, ‘I’m not really interested in that’. But no, once you mention the Barrier Reef, then right away, people’s hackles go up.” He later added, “This is all about the Barrier Reef—end of story, the Barrier Reef … one of the things I recognize by reading about cruise shipping in Caribbean and Central America is that unfettered, uncontrolled, can be dangerous. Dangerous to your environment, natural environment, business environment. It can be dangerous, and I studied more and more scenarios about it, and in some places, cruise operations were asked to leave.”

Today, public consultations with Waterloo’s consultants on a second Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) that they recently submitted after the rejection of their previous EIA are scheduled to be held at the Belize Best Western Biltmore Plaza. Waterloo Investment Holdings Limited, whose chairman is British business tycoon Lord Michael Ashcroft, has been trying to get environmental clearance to begin the development of yet another cruise port in the Belize District—yet another since two others, Port Coral at Stake Bank and Port of Magical Belize, near the Sibun River, have been given clearance by the National Environmental Appraisal Committee (NEAC), with the construction of Port Coral having already reached an advanced stage.

Waterloo is thus making another attempt to get the approval of the NEAC, which rejected the project’s EIA last December after citing lack of critical information that was not submitted—information related to grave concerns about the environmental impact of the project, particularly the disposal of millions of cubic meters of dredged material that the company initially proposed to dump offshore. Over the past few weeks, however, activists could be seen across the streets of Belize City, and according to Greenwood, countrywide, getting Belizeans to sign onto a petition to the government to stop the project. This is the second collective effort to bring the cruise port-related efforts of Waterloo to a halt, since a group of conservation NGOs, including OCEANA, had also sent a letter to the government last week to request that it halt all Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA’s) until the country’s environmental laws are updated, in line with one of the commitments that the country made when it entered the Blue Bond loan agreement.This recent ESIA submitted in August 2022 by Nextera on behalf of Waterloo is seemingly the third such submission, and questions are now being raised as to whether a company should have been given so many opportunities to push through a project after rejection. When asked a similar question yesterday by local reporters, Hon. Orlando Habet, Minister of Sustainable Development, Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management, said that the government has been advised that there is no current section of the law that addresses this matter.

“In the interpretation of the law, we decided that based on consultation with the legal minds, that even when you take something to court that the court, either the judge or the magistrate, would lean on allowing something to be resolved outside of the court if there is a possibility. So, because that article 23 gives the opportunity, the option to resubmit, when they requested for a resubmission, we said ‘okay, go ahead and resubmit’, but of course, it can’t be the same submission that they had before,” Minister Habet outlined.

While the environmental community believes that since this most recent ESIA was submitted following the signing of the Blue Bond agreement, it should not be considered before the EIA process has been updated and improved, Habet attempted to suggest that the commitments made as part of the Blue Bond financial arrangement could only be applicable to processes that have not started. He thus implied that the most recent Waterloo ESIA submission must be reviewed by the NEAC to avoid any litigation by the company.

The notion of putting a pause on all EIAs—as outlined in the Blue Bond agreement and suggested by the environmental community, is one that Habet believes is out of the question, since he is of the view that it would halt development across the country. He instead suggested that GoB should look at projects on an individual basis, and he highlighted what he believes are significant legal risks that could accompany any such decision.

“I think that what we have to do is look at the EIA process, what is legal, what is illegal, what will put us in trouble with the law, and frankly, when we get sued and we go to court and we have to pay, it’s not the government that is in power that paying, its all of us Belizeans that have to pay, so we have to make certain that we do things right on all sides so that at the end of the day we can proceed with national development that is sustainable for all of us, beneficial for all of us, but not one that will burden our children and grandchildren for many, many years,” he said.

Concerns about litigation by Waterloo are real—especially in light of the recent leaking of a letter written by Waterloo chairman, Lord Ashcroft, to the Prime Minister earlier this year after the rejection of a previous EIA submitted by the company. In that letter Ashcroft threatened to take legal action against the government of Belize. According to last Friday’s issue of the AMANDALA, Ashcroft stated in the letter that he and the UK shareholders of Waterloo are entitled to compensation under the Promotion and Protection of Investments 1982 agreement between Belize and the UK, since they have already invested upward of 5 million dollars in the project.

The letter was leaked last week, after GoB agreed to pay $76.5 million in compensation following a lawsuit brought by another Waterloo-affiliated enterprise, BISL, following the nationalization of the country’s ships registry in 2013. The timing of the leak suggested to some members of the public that attempts were.being made to intimidate the government in an effort to ensure approval of Waterloo’s most recent submission.

Waterloo’s previous submission, which had been rejected, had initially proposed that 7.5 million cubic meters of dredged material be dumped offshore—a suggestion that caused alarm among environmental groups and members of the public, and that even prompted the Belize Water Services Ltd. to issue a statement in which it expressed concern. The company then adjusted that section of its proposal and instead outlined nearshore and onshore dumping options. However, all the information requested by the NEAC was not made available. Minister Habet had even stated at the time that only a portion of the dredged material was accounted for in the document. The lack of information thus led to the rejection of the EIA in December 2021.

Minister Habet explained this week, “There were some missing points. If you recall, part of the criticism, even questions from the media, was why the letter was written saying it is not approved at this time. It was because they were required to submit certain information. We didn’t receive it on time.”

The vice president of OCEANA, Janelle Chanona, however, has dismissed the notion that the nearshore dumping now being proposed by the company would be less harmful to the Barrier Reef. Last week, she told 7News, “We confirm still to the position that ocean dumping does not and should never make sense for Belize. It is (I’m trying to be kind) a point of fact that offshore dumping and nearshore dumping are both dumping dredge spoils in the Caribbean Sea. You cannot tell me because the water is in front of Belize City versus in front of Turneffe that that is not the Caribbean Sea. You are talking about dumping millions of cubic meters of dredge spoils in the Caribbean Sea and all the science, all the data has shown, all the modeling has shown, that wherever you dump that material, it will end up on some part of the Belize Barrier Reef System.”

The representative for the petitioners, Thomas Greenwood, has expressed a similar view—that the alterations contained in the most recent ESIA will not reduce the potential environmental harm to be caused by the project. He stated plainly “once something is bad, out with it.”

“This is why when I see a government vacillating and hum-haw and all that—nuh man, we mustn’t have no humm- haw. We mustn’t have no hum-haw, and that kind of thing. Once something is bad, out with it! Sorry, we are not doing that kind of thing,” Greenwood stated.

Greenwood, a lifelong tour guide and activist in Belize, is also the president emeritus of FECTAB, an organization that has gone on the record to support the development of the Port Coral cruise destination development. Despite that project receiving its own pushback from the environmental community over a planned causeway linking the island to North Drowned Caye and then Belize City, FECTAB has indicated its approval of the Stake Bank Enterprises Ltd. (Feinstein Group) development.

His handing over of a petition to the government to block a cruise port that would compete with Stake Bank’s Port Coral—a project of a Belizean millionaire developer—might appear to be a conflict of interest. When questioned about this, he responded, “This country suffers from a deadly illness, a very extremely deadly illness. The moment anything, you know, kinda big and looking good start up, once it is run by native Belizean, native Belizeans and their cohorts from outside will hammer it as hard as they can. I’ve seen in my lifetime projects after projects fail, so I reach the stage where I say, guess what, maybe I should be supporting projects, maybe I should be making noise,” Greenwood said, adding that he’s known the Feinstein family (the investors in Port Coral) for most of his life.

He also noted that many international cruise enterprises had their eyes on Stake Bank.

“I know that there are other entities that had their eyes on Stake Bank—entities that I nuh wanh see inna this country at all, cah that Stake bank was just waiting to be developed,” Greenwood said.

The petition has now been submitted to the government. Minister Habet said that the petitioners had wanted to pass the signatures directly to PM Briceño, but he has been out of the country on “duty leave” and Deputy Prime Minister Cordel Hyde, who is the acting PM, was unable to attend the meeting.

Tonight, the public consultation on the Waterloo Cruise and Cargo Expansion of the Port of Belize will be held at the Belize Best Western Biltmore Plaza in Belize City and will likely be streamed online. 

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