FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

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Portugal Organizes for Its Proper Role in Belt and Road

March 24, 2018 (EIRNS)—Portugal’s Association of Friends of the New Silk Road (ANRS), with the support of the Costa government, held an international conference on “Belt and Road Financing” in Lisbon yesterday. Portugal’s rightful role in the global Belt and Road Initiative project, as a strategic crossroads where the Eurasian Silk Road Economic Belt meets the Atlantic route of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, was presented to an audience of bankers, businessmen, politicians and students from the University of Lisbon’s School of Economics and Management, which hosted the event.

“Portugal aspires to contribute to a new Maritime Silk Road,” Foreign Affairs Minister Augusto Santos Silva declared in opening the conference. Portugal’s deep-water port on the Atlantic, Sines, will be essential for completing the Belt and Road, he argued, because it is situated at the confluence of the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the South Atlantic, and the port takes on added importance after the expansion of the Panama Canal. He pointed to the Portuguese government’s recent launching of bidding for the construction and modernization of a key section of its rail system, so as to efficiently connect the Sines port by rail to Spain’s high-speed rail system, and thereby to the entire Eurasian rail network, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.