After years of stalled plans to restart operations at Jamaica’s shuttered Alpart bauxite plant, the country’s Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining Floyd Green is set to travel to China for high-stakes talks with the facility’s owner, state-owned Jiuquan Iron and Steel Company (JISCO), in a renewed push to bring the idle plant back online this year.
The Alpart plant in St Elizabeth has remained non-operational since 2019, when JISCO announced its closure to accommodate a large-scale modernization initiative. Back in 2025, Green shared public optimism that a phased restart of the facility was on the near horizon, leaving local stakeholders and industry observers waiting for tangible progress. Now, 12 months after that initial reopening projection, no firm timeline has been locked in, prompting the Jamaican government to ramp up pressure for action.
Speaking at a post-sectoral debate briefing in Kingston on Thursday, Green made clear the Jamaican government’s non-negotiable stance: the Alpart reopening process must get underway in 2026. “This plant sits on some of the largest untapped bauxite reserves in the region, and the economic vitality of not just St Elizabeth, but the entire Jamaican economy is tied to the revival of our bauxite and alumina mining sector,” Green emphasized.
Green outlined that JISCO had previously committed to three key pre-restart milestones: a full asset verification audit, renewed exploration activities across its mining concessions, and the launch of mandatory land reclamation work on already mined areas. To date, the company has fulfilled all three preconditions, but has yet to move forward with the long-promised phased reopening.
The company attributed the repeated delay to unforeseen weather-related disruptions during a December 2025 meeting with Green. The most recent setback came from Hurricane Melissa, which made landfall in Jamaica in late October 2025, causing substantial damage to the Port Kaiser infrastructure that the Alpart plant relies on for shipments. This damage came on the heels of Hurricane Beryl, which hit the island in July 2024, creating two consecutive major weather events that upended JISCO’s original cost and timeline projections. Green added that as a Chinese state-owned enterprise, JISCO operates with a centralized decision-making structure where all major strategic choices are made by leadership based in China, rather than the local on-ground team, creating additional layers of bureaucratic delay.
Back in March 2026, Green told Parliament’s Standing Finance Committee that JISCO would need to draft an entirely new development plan for the Alpart reopening, accounting for revised repair costs for Port Kaiser and new infrastructure investments to build climate resilience against future extreme weather events. On Thursday, he stressed that the window for further delays has closed, and the government is fully committed to securing a restart in 2026.
Against a backdrop of rising global aluminium prices and growing global demand for critical industrial minerals, Green said the upcoming trip to China will focus on securing a definitive timeline from JISCO’s top leadership. “We are going directly to the owners to get a clear answer on when we can expect operations to resume. Depending on the outcome of these discussions, the Jamaican government will be prepared to make whatever decisions are necessary to move this project forward,” Green said.
The minister’s delegation will not limit their discussions to the Alpart plant during the trip. They are also scheduled to hold talks with other Chinese business stakeholders with operations in Jamaica, including leadership at the Pan-Caribbean Sugar Company, as well as senior Chinese agricultural officials, with the goal of deepening bilateral cooperation across the agricultural sector.
The confirmation of the China trip came during a post-sectoral presentation press briefing at the Office of the Prime Minister in St Andrew on Thursday.