The flagship achievement of this government in the agricultural sector is the cattle industry. With ranchers now freely exporting cattle to Guatemala, and a formal trade with Mexico being established, the industry has experienced tremendous growth. There are more cattle in Belize than we and the tourists who come here can eat, and the foreign markets are eager to buy our excess, especially because our cattle are not juiced on hormones and other chemicals, and they are raised on grass and legumes, not in feedlots.
There’s a market out there for beef, and our foreign exchange earnings are not up to par because of diminished revenues from the citrus, farmed shrimp, and petroleum industries. It is apparent that the government sees increasing the national herd as one of the ways to boost our earnings. It is important that they think clearly before proceeding to “milk” it.
Increasing our national herd has to be a concern due to its implications for our trees. No omelet has ever been made without breaking an egg, and felling forest and converting it to grassland is how we raise cattle. Our ranchers are drooling. Firstly, there are the profits from the sales of beef; and secondly, felling forest opens the way for cattlemen to get control of more land.
Climate scientists have explained that the burning of fossil fuels and the use of certain industrial chemicals are extremely harmful to the atmosphere. ClientEarth explains: “When fossil fuels are burned, they release large amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the air. Greenhouse gases trap heat in our atmosphere, causing global warming.” That might not be so easy for minds that are not scientifically trained to grasp, but the negative impacts of deforestation, decreasing our tree cover, shouldn’t escape anyone. If you don’t accept that deforestation causes creeks and wells to dry up, exacerbates floods, leads to massive erosion that culminates with soil and petrochemicals settling on our reefs, causes desertification, you are not paying attention to serious issues or are well past the age of learning.
While there have been calls from the management of the Belize Livestock Producers Association and personnel in the ministry in charge of agriculture, for farmers to invest in increasing the productivity of existing pastures, there has been no information blitz to drive home this message, or changes in our laws to make that happen. The “lip service” could be influenced by the fact that our country still has considerable forest cover. A number of areas in our country are held as reserves, and this has saved much of our forests from being razed to the ground while other countries were bulldozing theirs. Thus far, we have done well, especially if we compare ourselves with countries that have done terrible damage to the environment.
King Tides are a phenomenon that we experience yearly, mainly in October. Prior to the one last month, has there ever been one that turned portions of Belize City into habitats for fish? Last week, some cities and towns in the US got hit by a hurricane, Helene, the likes of which they had never experienced before. Climate change is real. While our environmental transgressions are miniscule in comparison to some others’, that’s mainly because we are small. If only because we are among the countries most vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change, we must be champions for the trees.
Deforestation of jungle and mangroves, besides the irreparable harm it causes to our flora and fauna and climate, also endangers our number one foreign exchange earner: our tourism industry. We are deceiving ourselves if we believe we can let go the reins on cattle ranching, and not harm our tourism product.
Why would government, knowing the impacts of deforestation, encourage further expansion of the cattle industry? The answer to that is to increase our foreign exchange earnings. Maybe what we need to do is reduce our need for foreign exchange. If we invested more in the production of quality food for local consumption, we would reduce our need for foreign exchange, to buy foreign food.
What the ministry responsible for agriculture needs to put its primary focus on is ensuring that every Belizean has wholesome food on their table. That would be a given in a socialist system, because collectively we could handily surmount all the difficult logistics that are faced by people who live in small, sparsely populated countries. Forget that; we are not about becoming a socialist country. But we have to replace meals that are dominated by flour dough and white rice, Ramen, tinned meat, and “tin” everything in the diets of our people. If we can’t do that with the present system (we haven’t), then we have to devise a system that will achieve the end we must have. Our people have to eat well, so they are productive, and aren’t sickly.
Inflation has ravaged the purchasing power of our dollar. Data from the Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB) show that a pound of ground beef that cost $5.45 in July 2019, costed $7.26 in July 2024; the price of whole chicken was $3.18 per pound in July 2024, up from $2.57 per pound in July 2019; a pound of cabbage increased in price from $1.81 per pound in July 2019 to $2.85 in July 2024; a pound of RK beans costed $1.48 in July 2019, and jumped to $2.60 per pound in July 2024. Ministry of Agriculture data shows that the price of whole fish ranged between 5 and 8 dollars per pound in December 2018. The SIB says a pound of whole fish costed $9.18 per pound in July 2019.
Last year, Mexico provided substantial financial and technical support for our small farmers with its Sembrando Vida-Belize project. We are grateful. Our government has to increase its support for small farmers. Support from government would likely not have prepared farmers for the extremely high temperatures in April/May this year, temperatures which called for farmers to grow vegetables in bubble houses equipped with air-conditioners, but no drought should cause the supply of vegetables to dry up, pushing its price beyond the Belizean table. Nature has blessed us with plenty water; our farmers need more and better irrigation equipment. Government must subsidize our small farmers, at least to the level it did in the days of our green revolution in the 1970s.
It has become the fashion for our agriculture ministers and that ministry’s top staff to pose with large farmers, and boast of their productivity. Those farmers don’t need direct assistance from government. Instead, the ministry responsible for agriculture needs to expand its staff, and staff should be out in the fields, from the Rio Hondo to the Sarstoon, providing technical support to active small farmers, and encouraging farmers who stopped producing because they were made despondent by failures.
Our people need fresh fish. The cost of feed is the prohibitive factor that stands between Belize and increased production of tilapia. We have all the ingredients here to produce feed for farmed fish. Our people need fresh milk. Instead of increasing our beef herd, we should put more emphasis on dairy. The government must import dairy bulls, or invest in artificial insemination. Government must, as priority, ensure that wholesome food is in abundance, and that it is affordable for all our people.