Jamaicas North-South Highway solved a genuine, centuries-old problem: three and a half centuries without a modern road link between the islands north and south coasts, a real drag on development that successive governments understood but could not afford to fix, according to a Gleaner editorial on the deal.
China Harbour Engineering Company had the engineering capacity and the capital Jamaica lacked, but not for free. The concession was structured as build, own, operate and transfer, a toll road over a 50-year agreement. Because officials knew the corridor would not carry enough traffic for CHEC to recoup its investment through tolls alone, the deal included roughly 1,200 acres of land along the route, including prime parcels on the north shore, as an additional incentive meant to be leveraged for developments that would themselves generate traffic onto the highway.
The controversy surfaced years later when Ivan Anderson, head of the National Road Operating and Constructing Company, revealed there had been no formal market valuation of that land before it was transferred to CHEC as part of the agreement. The public complaint that followed was straightforward: the imputed US$20 million price attached to all the land was too low, potentially by a wide margin, given some of the parcels included valuable north-coast frontage.
The Gleaner’s own editorial position was notably restrained, declining to pronounce on whether the valuation was actually too low while insisting the debate be conducted with reference to basic economics rather than emotion alone. That restraint aside, the substance of the complaint has not gone away: a major infrastructure concession that reshaped how Jamaicans move between the coasts was also, without independent appraisal, a very large land transfer whose true value the public still does not have a clear, verified answer to.
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