by Charles Gladden
BELIZE CITY, Mon. Aug. 29, 2022
The Caribbean Shrimp Company, a shrimp farm in the country that has been operational since 1986, has received international certification from the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), which provides a guarantee to buyers that it has met the industry’s standards.
The 266-acre farm is family-owned by second-generation Belizean-Canadian citizens, and each year the farm, on which more than 30 persons are employed, produces more than 100,000 pounds of organically-grown shrimp for the local and export markets.
“It’s fantastic. I can’t even begin to describe how ecstatic I was that we were able to work through this process. This is to Belize the longest continuously-owned shrimp farm in the country, because it’s been under one ownership the whole time. And we have been operating the whole time – maybe at a lesser capacity, depending on how things are going – but we have been operating right through,” said Heather McIntosh, general manager and owner of Caribbean Shrimp Company Limited, to a local media outlet.
McIntosh added, “I am Belize’s smallest shrimp farm, so for us to be able to work through such an arduous process and it is only a team of two – myself and my office manager, Miss Yolanda Cacho – we did all of the documentation provision and everything. ASC sends a control union representative; two come and do an onsite audit. We had three, because they brought a trainee with them as well. And they were here for two solid days, starting at six in the morning, and they looked at every single document, every single process, [and] did a full site inspection to go through the multitude of processes and parameters to make sure that we complied with that process. And it wasn’t easy. There are steps along the path where we weren’t a hundred percent compliant, but they give you time to show them that you can become compliant.”
McIntosh mentioned that the company produces sixteen shrimps per cubic meter of the farm’s ponds, as they try to make the environment as natural as possible.
“Some of the other farms do between two hundred and four hundred shrimp per cubic meter, because they do intensive farming. I have extensive farming, and I have earthen ponds. I try to keep it as close to nature as possible. I have mangroves all around the ponds to try and naturally filter the water. I have no mechanized equipment here; it is all-natural,” she said.
The aim for the company is to focus on export, niche consumer, resort, and retail markets, and, now, agri-tourism.