At the 9th Summit of the Americas, PM Briceño spoke of existential problems facing our country, region and the world. In respect to climatic challenges, we are, like many other countries, experiencing unprecedented floods and extended droughts. In respect to the cost of living, it has never been this high, and the cost of goods, especially imported ones, is rising almost daily.
Some estimates put the purchasing power of a Belize dollar at about 70% of what it was a few years ago. For over a decade, salary increments for public employees have not been keeping up with cost of living increases. The small sugarcane and citrus farmers haven’t had a good payday for a long time. In the cauldron of urban Belize, especially on the Southside of Belize City, violence and illegal activities have increased as people struggle for survival.
The rich are having the time of their lives as they gobble up the properties of the poor and avail themselves of the cheaper money being made available by GOB, but for the masses the suffering is great. Roots Belizeans, those whose ancestry extend to and before the birth of the nationalist movement, have every reason to ask, what their parents were fighting for. Our leaders since we became self-governing aren’t entirely responsible for our present dire situation, but if they had had a better education vision and not abandoned Roots Belizean farmers who weren’t engaged in agriculture for export, our people would have been a lot more financially resilient, much better prepared for this crisis.
Far too little has been invested in vocational education in the new Belize. While the old apprenticeship system produced seamstresses, mechanics, machinists, electricians, shoemakers, farmers, fishermen, plumbers, carpenters, masons, midwives, people with the essential skills to build a nation, our current education system focuses on training our people to be servants and perform clerical jobs. The present leadership has indicated that there will be a new vision. Our education system must give our youth the tools that will take our country out of poverty, to that place where all of us win. It would compound a tragedy if what we get is the same curriculum, in new clothing.
As we work for a better tomorrow, there is the here and now, and while every Belizean is important, the primary focus must be on the children of the people whose parents bought into the dream of independence and sacrificed to make it happen. While we prepare for tomorrow, our people have to eat wholesome food and live in homes with comfort and security.
There was some preening here when it was stated at the 52nd annual meeting of the Caribbean Development Bank that we are one of three countries in the Caribbean that produce 50% of the food they consume, but if George Price came back for a visit and looked into a few pots to see how his people were doing, what would he find? Would he find 50% of us eating Ramen and chicken sausage? It isn’t so difficult to put whole grain rice, beans, vegetables, fruits, beef, poultry, fish, and pork on Belizean tables. For that to happen all the GOB has to do is turn back, to where it left off, when our leaders neglected Roots Belizean farmers.
The present brain trust in agriculture has earned many points for opening doors for established farmers, but enough isn’t being done for the ones who were abandoned by previous governments, and untrained new ones who are fighting for food independence.
The local version of the Green Revolution did not begin with the nationalist movement. Advocacy for a shift from logging to farming began long before that. The archives bulge with research done by experts to find the crops and animal stock that were viable in Belize. The Marketing Board was set up in 1948, and shortly after that, Central Farm, the foremost research station in the country, was established.
In the local version of the Green Revolution, in its heyday in the 1970s, cooperative farming was emphasized. Dynamic farm demonstrators visited traditional and displaced forest-workers-turned- farmers, introducing new plant varieties and farm animals, and teaching them modern practices. The government acquired idle land and distributed farm plots to landless Belizeans, particularly in the north and west. The government extended machinery services to farmers at heavily subsidized prices.
All of that went out the window when someone hollered, communism! It’s possible that local leftwing agents were getting too close to their colleagues in Guatemala, who were involved in a terrible civil war. Belizeans had little interest in following the communist path. Times were tough, but on the eve/in the age of independence, Belizeans were hopeful, believing in the promise that with that change in status prosperity would come.
The farmers’ cooperatives collapsed, the GOB abandoned its support for traditional and new farmers, and the agriculture industry fell into the lap of our Mennonite group, which was far more “communist”, far more into cooperativism than any other group in Belize. Traditional and new farmers got dumped. Many of their children migrated to urban areas. Today, they are at the bottom of the heap; it is their pots that have Ramen and tinned sausage inside.
The GOB needs to go back to where it left off. The GOB must build silos; identify and encourage Roots Belizeans in rural areas to get into grain production; do more research on the production of feeds for poultry, pigs and tilapia; subsidize machinery costs; and return the farm extension services to those days when we were so filled with hope.
GOB must do better at keeping costs down for the people, and a good start would be to extend price control to ALL locally produced foods under monopoly control. Presently, in the monopoly industries prices are not set based on the cost of production, they are set against foreign imports, some of which carry inflated prices because they are subjected to numerous tariffs.
The GOB’s housing program is on the right path, but on the wrong scale. We might be able to expand the program if we found a way to utilize materials with building potential that are plentiful in Belize. If it helps to cry, it is such a tragedy that our forests are depleted, cannot contribute much to the building of the houses we desperately need. Whatever lumber there is, and it’s mostly imported, only the rich can buy. Our leaders have to identify more financing and make it available at the lowest possible cost to less well-off Belizeans.
It seems like forever that the Belizean people are being asked to “kip heart.” The social chaos in certain areas shows that hope is flagging. The times are tough, and the welfare of every person in Belize is a concern. But the focus must primarily be on Roots Belizeans, they whose forebears sacrificed to build this new nation.