Brazil’s passionate Ports Minister Helder Barbalho announced that the recently delayed second tranche of port privatizations valued at more than 2.8 billion reais ($763.3 million) would go forward on June 5 at the Sao Paulo bourse.

In his opening speech at the Intermodal South America conference he said Brazil would be able to overcome the political and economic challenges facing the port sector to secure investment through a “big effort.”

The minister has stayed on in his post after his political party, the PMDB, quit the government to start impeachment proceedings related to the Car Wash scandal against President Dilma Rousseff.

The port community, which had wrung its hands over Barbalho’s relative inexperience when he was appointed last year, is warming to the minister, who is said to be reveling in the challenges of the job.

“I refuse to be catatonic when facing the huge, first challenges. There has been a lot of talk about the difficulties we are experiencing right now, but we will face them and overcome them,” Barbalho said in his speech. "The logistics sector plays an important role for Brazil to grow and develop. For the country to be competitive, you need fast and efficient logistics.”

He said that he was “an optimist” and that logistics and ports would play a major role in a prosperous future for Brazil, while noting that in the last five months the Secretariat of Ports authorized about 8 billion reais of new investments, with 6 billion of that going to private terminals.

Barbalho expects 51 billion reais of investment in the port sector between now and 2042, when Brazil’s cargo volumes are expected to double.

The Intermodal South America conference is hosted by UBM Brazil to foster a conversation among stakeholders on how to solve the problems facing Brazil’s ports and logistics sectors.

“With all this turbulence and uncertainty the only thing we can be sure of in Brazil is that we have the ability to overcome these problems,” UBM President Jean Francoise Quentin said. “Intermodal South America has the capacity to bring together all the major foreign trade cargo players under the one roof and this will benefit the country.”