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“In Burma such dividends will flow not into the country's economy as such, but to the regime and its business associates,” he added.
 
The International Herald Tribune reported that the project includes a profit-sharing agreement with the Burmese junta, but executives from Italian-Thai said they could not divulge details. Meanwhile, business sources in Rangoon told The Irrawaddy that one of the regime's closest cronies have already been awarded huge contracts related to the Tavoy project. He is Max Myanmar owner Zaw Zaw, who accompanied Burma's top general on a tour of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in China last year. Zaw Zaw, chairman of Myanmar Football Federation, is on US sanctions lists, and favored business associate of junta head Snr-Gen Than Shwe and is especially close to former Lt-Gen Thiha Thura Tin Aung Myint Oo, the Secretary 1 of the ruling junta and chairman of the regime's Trade Council.

With some of Burma's top businessmen already on board, the project has also attracted the attention of other local business people hoping to cash in on what looks like a potential goldmine. Residents of villages near the project area, most of whom make a living by farming or fishing, say that there has been a sudden influx of outsiders, including not only Thai employees of Italian-Thai, but also Burmese from other parts of the country trying to snap up properties ahead of the coming rush.
 
“There are lots of people coming and going all the time, many of them hunting for houses and land to buy,” said one resident of Maungmagan, a village well known for its attractive beach.

He said people are trying to acquire houses and plots of land in his village because it is not located inside the project area. In that area, he said, nobody is interested in buying property because they know that it could soon be taken away from them.
 
In Tavoy, a city of around 150,000 inhabitants, residents told The Irrawaddy that land and house prices have doubled or tripled in recent months as businessmen, most of them close to the military regime, look for places to open banks, hotels and other businesses. One local business owner said that an acre of land in downtown Tavoy suitable for building a hotel is now worth as much as 1.5 billion kyat ($1.8 million)—three times what it would have cost before.

The Tavoy project is also expected to increase tourism in the region, especially in southern Tenasserim's Mergui archipelago. One proposal that has been put forward is to extend the reach of the project by 300 miles (483 km) to include the archipelago's pristine islands, which are already famous for their white sand beaches, crystal clear water and abundance of marine life.
 
While foreign investors consider the potential for future spinoffs from the Tavoy project, Burma's domestic media has focused mainly on its possible impact on the country's economy. Most reports have highlighted how Tavoy will become the region's biggest and most modern seaport, providing a shortcut between Europe and mainland Southeast Asia and possibly transforming Burma's economy the way that Shenzhen marked China's first step along the way to becoming an economic superpower.

What Burma's heavily censored domestic media has not mentioned, however, is the cost of this project for those who will be most directly affected by it. This cost, say observers who have been watching this project take shape, will be measured not only in the loss of land by farmers currently working their fields in the area, but also in the long-term environmental degradation it is expected to cause.

Local officials have told The Irrawaddy that many farmers continue to grow seasonal crops in the project area, but others who worked at rubber plantations are already gone, forced to leave to make way for companies that are increasingly moving in to claim land that has sustained local people for generations.
 
According to locally based researchers, Kaung Myat Co, Ltd, a Burmese logging company, recently seized 2,000 acres of land in the area, while Hein Yadanan Company confiscated 500 acres belonging to villagers living in Myatta, near the region where the deep-sea port project will be built.
 
Saw Eh Na, one of the researchers, said that the villagers were not compensated for the loss of their land, and most now have no means of making a living. He added that the land confiscation was likely related to the sea-port project. “The companies will plant rubber that they can sell to companies in the industrial zone that will be built in the Dawei port area,” he said.
 
Sources also said the trade route that will be built from Tavoy to Thailand also crosses several plantations belonging to Myatta village residents, meaning that many more villagers fear they will soon be forced off their land.
 
Environmentalists are also worried. They say that the planned project will damage the region's coastline and its relatively untouched wilderness areas.