Turkey brief
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- Property prices along the proposed route immediately soared upon the announcement of the project.
The “Crazy” ProjectPrime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on April 27, 2011, unveiled the “Crazy Project” -- a mega canal scheme that aims to be a safer alternative route to the Bosphorus for oil tankers, commercial shipping and military vessels.Set to be completed by 2023, the centennial of the Turkish Republic, Canal İstanbul will stretch 50 km and link the Black and Marmara Seas. Dwarfing both the Suez and Panama Canal projects, the vast waterway will be at least 150 meters wide and 50 meters deep -- big enough for the navigation of supertankers and aircraft carriers.Speaking at a glitzy ceremony in İstanbul just over a month before parliamentary elections, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said: “İstanbul, from now on, will be a city which has two seas. With this project, there will be two peninsulas and one island in the city.”The canal, which will be located at least 50 km west of İstanbul in Thracian Turkey, is intended to cut heavy shipping congestion on the Bosphorus, a 31 km waterway that snakes through the heavily populated city of İstanbul, and make it a yachting and sailing paradise.Increased tanker traffic on the Bosphorus has been threatening the city of 14 million for the past four decades. The city has so far narrowly escaped damage from several fiery oil tanker collisions on the waterway that set off spectacular explosions, fires and oil spills that polluted its shores. The Bosphorus with the connecting Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles make up the Turkish Straits that link the Black Sea with the Aegean and the Mediterranean. Due to its 12 sharp turns, cross currents, sudden impenetrable fog that often descends along its shores without warning, and hundreds of oil tankers, chemical carriers, passenger ferries, fishing boats, and a host of other small craft that ply its waters daily, the Bosphorus is the most difficult to navigate of the three bodies of water in the Turkish Straits. Around 50,000 ships pass through it every year, including some 8,000 oil tankers and hundreds of naval vessels. Turkey's government has been pushing for construction of an overland pipeline that would bypass the straits and reduce the dangerous traffic, but has failed to persuade oil companies to commit to using the pipeline. The need to unload and load the oil one additional time would make the route expensive, according to oil company officials, the Wall Street Journal reported.Turkish officials said ships carry 140 million tons of oil, four million tons of liquefied petroleum gas and three million tons of chemicals through the strait annually, putting the city’s inhabitants at risk.From 1982 to 2003 there were 608 shipping accidents in the Bosphorus, according to a study by the French Association of Ships' Captains. A Romanian tanker crash with a Greek freighter in 1979 spilled 95,000 tons of oil and killed more than 42 Romanian crew members. In 1991, a Lebanese cargo vessel, carrying 20,000 sheep, sank in the Bosphorus after colliding with a Phillipines freighter. For several months the waterway was strewn with dead sheep. In 1994, an oil tanker and cargo vessel collided in the Bosphorus, spilling 9,000 tons of oil and closing the strait for days as some 20,000 tons of oil burned. Plans also include the building of a third airport in İstanbul, resort hotels and marinas along the proposed canal and new condominium townships in Thrace. Turkey’s opposition, however, claims the schemes are aimed at enriching cronies in the ruling Justice and Development Party.İstanbul Mayor Kadir Topbas said Canal İstanbul would cost at least $10 billion, but analysts predicted it would more likely exceed $50 billion as the waterway would have to be cut through rolling hills, rich farmlands blooming with sunflowers and pastures with dairy farms.Property prices along the proposed route immediately soared upon the announcement of the project.Vedat Akgiray, chairman of the Capital Market Board, which governs securities trading in Turkey, said the Canal İstanbul could be financed with an offering of “Crazy Bonds.”Construction of the canal, however, won’t guarantee that commercial ships will go through it. Navigation on the Turkish Staits is governed by the 1936 International Montreux Agreement. Turkey can only charge fees for sanitary control stations, lighthouses services, channel buoys, life saving services and pilotage. But pilotage services, the biggest money earner, are optional.2.12 TOURISM The Florida of Europe, Turkey Attracts Tourists From All Over the World. Construction is continuing on hundreds of new luxury hotels and holiday villages along the Turquoise Coast, the highly indented southwest corner of Anatolia, which will cement the nation’s place in the big leagues of world tourism in the next five years. In addition to the hotel and resort construction boom, drinking water and sewage systems are being overhauled, and new marinas and golf courses are being built to attract rich foreign tourists to coastal areas, characterized by miles of long, unpolluted beaches, ruins of magnificent cities of antiquity, and long warm summers and mild winters. New hotels are also springing up in İstanbul and other big cities to encourage convention and business tourism across Turkey. Turkey is one of the world's fastest growing tourism markets. The number of tourists visiting Turkey swelled 21.7-fold in the past three decades, from 1.523 million in 1979 to a record 33.027 million in 2010, including 28.632 million foreign nationals and 4.395 million Turks living abroad but visiting the country, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUİK). In 2008, the country had a 3.34% share in the global tourism market share, up from 2.7% in 2005. By 2023, the centennial of the republic, Turkey aims to attract 60 million foreign tourists annually and earn $60 billion a year from tourism, according to the State Planning Organization (DPT).
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