by Marco Lopez

BELMOPAN, Thurs. June 15, 2023

Planting Life – this is the essence of the project launched today by the Government of Belize and the Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation (AMEXCID). Since August 2022, small farmers from across Belize were registered and interviewed for the project, and today the first farmers received debit cards to collect monthly subsidies at a ceremony in Yo Creek, Orange Walk. Two thousand farmers will use the resources granted through the program to sustainably enhance productivity and increase income generation.

The project, which the Mexican Government hopes to implement across the region, is the base of the Glasgow Declaration on Forest and Land Use. There was a consensus that the Sembrando Vida program should be the model program to address forest and reforestation issues related to climate change. Executive Director of AMEXCID, Dr. Laura Elena Carillo Cubillas, said that millions of farmers in Mexico already benefit from the project.

“We can say that our pilot program … we’ve been working on it for four years now,” Cubillas said. She outlined how Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador wanted to share the program with other countries, and when he visited Belize last year he signed commitments with the GoB, which included the introduction of Sembrando Vida in Belize.

“The president just told us, AMEXCID, to go ahead and do it. We have two thousand beneficiaries by now,” she said. The team from AMEXCID is going to be working closely with the farmers, Cubillas explained, adding that “we want to make sure everybody has a chance to develop, in their own country, in their own land, and that we can work together and be stronger.”

Enriching the soil with environmentally friendly bio-products is one of the aspects of the program. Over the eight months, farmers will be given “an agriculture package of seeds, fertilizers, tools, and fruit and forest trees, and capacity-building training,” along with a monthly cash subsidy. Cubillas explains, “We want to enrich the soil, we want to make it more productive, we want to have crops that we can sell on the market, and we want to give our beneficiaries a little something, a little cash, so they can get by, have quality of life, and focus on making their parcels more productive.”

Minister of Agriculture, Hon. Jose Mai, shared that the project has been in the pipeline for at least a year now. In his interview Mai shared that the project is in line with Belize’s trajectory towards sustainable practices.

“Totally, the project is about USD$3 million – BZD$6 million, which will be given in cash and bio inputs to the farmers. So, I think it is going to take us a long way, and it is really focusing on what we are now really concerned about, which are environmentally friendly practices,” Mai said.

The farmer-beneficiaries of the Sembrando Vida program in Belize make up a diverse pool of men, women, and youth, Mai explained. He said a technical assessment of what we have and what can grow in the country will be done, and the crops selected using the technical guidelines will be provided to farmers free of charge to plant.

“For example, we want to do soursop, we want to do lime. We are sourcing these trees; we are ensuring that the lime trees are given to the farmers. They won’t get cash to buy the lime tree; they will get the lime tree, or they will get soursop plants, and that’s how we’ll work it,” Mai said.