The Northern Development Corridor, CDN, hopes by February to conclude negotiations around three giant projects that will increase the volume of cargo handled in the Nacala Port, CDN administrator Fernando Couto said on Tuesday.

This could put it in competition with South Africa's Durban port, Africa's busiest harbour.

Couto told Reuters one such project was the erection of a warehouse to store sugar for South African sugar firm Illovo, which wants to export 150 000 tonnes of sugar a year by 2008.

CDN, which runs the Nacala port, also plans an agreement with a Malawian wheat company to construct silos with the capacity to store 50 000 tonnes of wheat in addition to handling 300 000 tonnes of clinker for a cement company.

"We are concluding talks with two of these companies in February and the sugar warehouse could be built in the second half of 2007 in a period spanning six months," he said in an interview.

He said CDN's primary aim now is to fully restore critical transport and warehousing infrastructure in the region.

"For these three projects, we have budgeted an expenditure of US$10m in 2007 in order to meet the clients in the initial stage because demand on facility and usage is growing day after day," he said.

Couto said prior to the outbreak of civil war in Mozambique in the mid-1980s, 95 per cent of Malawi's trade and much of Zambia's imports and exports were routed through the ports of Nacala and Beira.

"We want to reduce Malawi's transport bill which has almost doubled as it was forced to re-route as much as 85 per cent of its traffic through the South African port of Durban, with the balance going through Dar es Salaam in Tanzania," he said.

"We want to maximise the economic potential in northern Mozambique and eastern Zambia which remains unexploited due to sub-optimal transport logistics," Couto said.

Nacala port and the 16 000 km rail line linking northern Mozambique, Malawi and eastern Zambia are poised for major upgrading as part of an initiative aimed at promoting regional economic development in the CDN.

CDN won a multi-national tender and a long-term concession to upgrade and operate the deepwater port at Nacala in northern Mozambique including the rail line linking the facility to landlocked Malawi and eastern Zambia.

Nampa-Reuters

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