SPICY HILL, Trelawny - GROUND was broken and a contract signed last week for the start of infrastructural work, including the installation of roads and water at the site of the Steelfield, Spicy Hill Sugar Barracks Relocation Programme in Trelawny.

The project forms part of a J$1.4-billion programme by the Jamaican Government, in partnership with the European Union to resettle some 876 residents from sugar estate barracks islandwide, in some 400 houses at seven sites across four parishes.

The infrastructural work at Spicy Hill, to be undertaken by contractor D R Foote Construction Company Limited, at a cost of $60 million, is slated for completion by April 2013.

Follow-up phases of the project will begin after that, culminating in the building of 39 housing units for 97 people who now reside in sugar estate barracks.

The contract was the second to be signed under the project with work having started on two sites in Westmoreland in September.

Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries Roger Clarke, who, along with EU Ambassador Paola Amadei, broke ground for the project, said it comes under the Accompanying Measures for Sugar Programme (AMSP).

He explained that under the scheme, all residents of the sugar estate barracks identified by the Sugar Transformation Unit are to be relocated to new housing developed on excluded estate lands.

Head of the EU delegation to Jamaica Ambassador Amadei expressed her pleasure at the venture.

"No development can be sustainable if it is not equitable: if progress leaves behind people. Therefore we could not be proud of the EU-Jamaica Sugar Programme if it would not have included initiatives like the one we celebrate today," she said.