31.1 C
Belize City
Thursday, March 28, 2024

World Down Syndrome Day

Photo: Students and staff of Stella Maris...

BPD awards 3 officers with Women Police of the Year

Photo: (l-r) Myrna Pena, Carmella Cacho, and...

Suicide on the rise!

Photo: Iveth Quintanilla, Mental Health Coordinator by Charles...

Rice is nice for Blue Creek farmers – not so for Agric Ministry?

GeneralRice is nice for Blue Creek farmers – not so for Agric Ministry?
Responding to reports that rice may have to be imported due to flood conditions in the Orange Walk District, Belize Food Supply, the main distributor of rice to the North and West of the country, invited three media houses, including the Amandala, on a tour of Blue Creek Village, the heart of Mennonite country – and rice country – to prove otherwise.
 
Here, the fields, sandwiched between sprouting soybeans, grazing cattle and rugged terrain, look as if they were lifted from a postcard. It helps that Blue Creek is enjoying a welcome spell of sunshine after the rains of October that threatened to sweep away the hard work of the 25 or so farmers who have worked the fields here since the 1980’s.
 
Rice production in Blue Creek comes in two varieties: 1) upland farming, the regular fields that were planted earlier this year around June and July and are just now about ready for harvest; and 2) irrigated farming, done mostly in lower-lying areas and not ready to plant until December, with harvest expected – under optimal conditions – in April or May.
 
The upland farmers, 66% of the total, have already begun to harvest from their fields. One of the bigger farmers, Edward Reimer, whose mill was the first stop on our tour, reaped 300 tons of rice paddy (the condition in which the rice goes to the mill) from his 200-acre spread. After milling, he expects to end up with 3.5 – 4 million pounds of usable rice, about 3 months’ supply (Belizeans consume about 1.2 million pounds per year, Belize Food Supply estimates.)
 
According to Reimer, while Belize’s rice industry is not yet at the point of exporting enough rice abroad to earn national income, greater assistance to the agriculture industry will help Belize to remain self-sufficient in rice, as we have been for the past five years, and eventually in other products from the ground.
 
Reimer and his fellow farmers feel that governments, particularly the administration previous to the current UDP administration, see agriculture as a grab-tub of profits, especially from imports.
 
Crippling taxes on input for rice production, particularly fuel and electricity, have sent the average price of a pound of rice soaring from $0.85/lb. last year to $1.31 as of June.
 
Government wants the prices down to facilitate consumer spending in the upcoming Christmas season, but Reimer and his fellow farmers don’t see how that is possible, since production is already underway.
 
Most of the rice in Blue Creek is processed at Circle R Mills, run by Jacob Neufeld. Neufeld says the mill can run 24 hours a day if necessary, and over the next few weeks will process much of the rice harvested from the fields of farmers like Peter Rempel, who showed us around his 900-acre spread, where everything is grown, but rice is king.
 
Rempel expects to start harvesting by next week, depending on the weather, and all indications are that there will be a bumper crop.
 
Neufeld and Rempel say Circle R is a cooperative enterprise, with nearly all the farmers processing their rice there or at Edward Reimer’s mill. Up to 65% of rice paddy survives the conversion to whole grain rice – the rest is used to feed animals.
 
The Blue Creek farmers normally compete, they say, with farmers at Shipyard and Hillbank in Orange Walk, Spanish Lookout in Cayo, and mechanized farmers in Toledo. But the competitors’ crops are all either washed out in the floods or they have run into other problems, which may be the source of Government’s worries.
 
But the Government of Belize shouldn’t worry, says Belize Food Supply’s managing partner Carlos Moreno, an agronomist by profession.
 
According to Moreno, the farmers in Blue Creek can ably supply the country with rice for the next few months while rice farmers elsewhere get back on their feet. The expected government assistance will be welcomed, but the simplest solution, Moreno tells us, is for the Ministry of Agriculture and the Belize Marketing and Development Corporation (BMDC) (old Marketing Board) to stay out of the equation.
 
The BMDC disputes the farmers’ version of events.
 
Roque Mai, the Corporation’s director, said they went by the predictions of the Met Service, who estimated that it would take 2-3 weeks for the water to recede in the area after the floods. It actually took less than that, but because Blue Creek farmers had yet to harvest and the BMDC’s usual providers at Hillbank and Shipyard had been unable to transport their crops due to the flooded road, the Corporation felt it necessary to import 150,000 lbs. of rice from Sinaloa, Mexico, by special permit, after determining that a shortage might occur if they did not act immediately.
 
That crisis has now passed, and the BMDC says the farmers in Blue Creek are acting in an “unethical” manner by getting peeved over the Corporation’s decision. The BMDC says it found it hard to negotiate with the Blue Creek farmers when they sat down last year, because they wanted a promise to help along the rice industry while at the same time limiting imports, which the BMDC says it could not do. The BMDC says it only markets rice from Shipyard, Hillbank (Uncle John, which does well) and Toledo.
 
“There are no plans at this time to import rice,” Mai told us.

Check out our other content

World Down Syndrome Day

Suicide on the rise!

Check out other tags:

International