Egypt wants to ease the movement of products from the mainland into Sinai Peninsula and then onward to Jordan, Syria and Iraq or to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries as well as tapping Sinai’s natural resourches, including marble, phosphates, iron one, manganese and uranium.
Egypt is nearing completion of four tunnels expected to revolutionise economic development in the Sinai Peninsula by easing the movement of people and merchandise to the peninsula and increase trade with Arab Gulf states. They have invested more than $1 billion in building tunnels under the Suez Canal to connect the Egyptian mainland with Sinai for the first time.
Construction began in June 2016, almost a year after Egypt dug a parallel channel to the Suez Canal to allow two-way traffic in the strategic maritime passageway. In February 2018, Egypt unveiled a $15 billion development blueprint for Sinai, to which Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait are contributing.
Before construction of the tunnels, vehicles headed to the Sinai had to wait for hours on the west bank of the Suez Canal to be ferried across the canal. The tunnels will shorten travel between the west bank of the Suez Canal and the east bank to less than 20 minutes.
Intense work is under way in the Suez Canal region to create a major logistical and industrial hub. China, India and Russia are among countries that have reserved space in the region and planned major industrial zones there. Egyptian economic planners said they could not attract investment to the Suez Canal region unless they developed the needed infrastructure to ease the movement of goods to markets in Africa, as the cost of transport is a determining factor for the attraction of investments.
Egypt is also yet to tap Sinai’s natural wealth. Economists said resources include phosphates, manganese, iron ore, marble and uranium. The peninsula has thousands of hectares of land that could be used for agriculture. The government aspires to relocate millions of people from the densely populated Nile Delta and Valley to the Sinai Peninsula, so that they would speed up development in Sinai.
Source: thearabweekly.com
