Plantations Committee to pick financial advisors to evaluate state plantations
View(s):The Plantations Committee of the Public Enterprise Development Ministry has decided to appoint financial consultants to evaluate state plantations for certain projects, officials said. The committee was to forward a paper for restructuring state plantations to the Cabinet Committee on Economic Management (CCEM) last week, but it decided to first do a financial evaluation on ‘ancillary projects’ that would be executed in these plantations, one official said. “We want to evaluate plantations for ancillary businesses such as hydro power, tourism, etc as we want to expedite such projects when we issue the Expressions of Interest (EOI) after which we will call for suitable proposals,” an official told the Business Times.
He said that these firms will be handpicked based on their qualifications and then shortlisted to do a financial evaluation. He added that in terms of state assets the plantations have lands, minerals, water, beauty/scenery and plants and the committee is looking at the plantations to maximise the returns of these assets by evaluating them. The official added that apart from the 20,000 hectares (ha) of productive agricultural lands under these plantations, there’re 38000 ha of land out of which 15000 ha are non productive and which can be allocated for tourism, or renewable energy projects.
He said that in around the next two months the committee plans to call for all the non productive lands in state plantations for Public Private Partnerships but as a first step the financial evaluation was decided on to streamline this process. So far the ministry has received some 80 unsolicited project proposals, and the official said that out of these there are 12 projects that can be started immediately. These include a coconut cultivation project by Damro, a cattle farm project that’ll have milch cows by Cargills, a coconut husk project by Marina and a water bottling plant project by an international firm. -(DE)