The high­way to Point Fortin, which will run through the ma­jor­i­ty of Trinidad's South-West­ern penin­su­la, is one of five growth poles iden­ti­fied by gov­ern­ment which are ex­pect­ed to con­tribute to di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the econ­o­my.

Thats the word from the Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Min­istry which said in a state­ment: "Cur­rent­ly work is be­ing done to de­vel­op a port at Brighton, La Brea, while a study on the ra­tio­nal­i­sa­tion of the ports in T&T is be­ing con­duct­ed which will de­ter­mine any spe­cialised roles for the var­i­ous ports. This is be­ing fund­ed by the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank."

�2 In­vest­ment

�2 Con­struc­tion

�2 In­fra­struc­ture de­vel­op­ment

�2 Jobs

The Min­is­ter said jobs will be cre­at­ed at the Union Es­tate In­dus­tri­al Park in La Brea. "The Mit­subishi/Neal & Massy project due for con­struc­tion, to­geth­er with the port, will yield con­struc­tion jobs at first and ul­ti­mate­ly good sus­tain­able em­ploy­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties."

Con­struc­tion projects at Union Es­tate will in­clude a methanol plant aimed at ex­port­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 50 per cent of the out­put "with the bal­ance used to feed a sec­ondary in­ter­me­di­ate and then to a ter­tiary petro­chem­i­cal prod­uct."

The Mit­subishi Cor­po­ra­tion of Japan plans to in­vest US$850 mil­lion in this project. Gov­ern­ment an­tic­i­pates that sev­er­al new "ex­port fo­cused in­dus­tries" will cre­ate more sus­tain­able jobs and strong in­dus­tries. The Eco­nom­ic De­vel­op­ment Board of the Min­istry said over a five-year pe­ri­od 4,000 jobs will be cre­at­ed in the short-term and 900 jobs in the long term.