The announcement last week that the Canadian government had decided to cancel flights of the major Canadian airlines to Mexico and the Caribbean, right on the heels of the new US government requiring all air passengers to present a negative Covid-19 test when entering that country, is more cold water on an industry that has been doing everything possible to survive. Tourism has been number one in most Caribbean countries for decades, and for quite a few years now it has been the number one foreign exchange earner/employer in Belize, until the pandemic came and let the air out.

Canadians only make up about 7% of overnight tourist arrivals to Belize — with 35,190 of them coming to our shores in 2018, according to the Belize Tourism Board; but there were high hopes that their numbers would greatly increase after Air Canada announced in September 2019 that it would be increasing flights to our country during the peak tourism months, December to April.

Jim Byers, in the magazine, Travel Pulse, Canada, said Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, declared that the country’s major airlines would be suspending all flights to the Caribbean and Mexico from Sunday, January 31, to April 30, and passengers on international flights from other countries will, “as soon as possible”, have to take a PCR test after arriving in the country. Canada is taking these steps in response to the pandemic out of special concern about Covid-19 variants that have appeared in the world.

The US was one step ahead, with the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention declaring that all air passengers entering the US on or after January 26, 2021 would require a negative COVID-19 test. Our Ministry of Health and Wellness, via a press release, responded almost immediately that it would “expand testing to now include all persons requiring a negative COVID-19 test to enter other countries.” The quick response from our government was essential, because the release from the US prompted cancellations from American tourists who had booked hotel stays in Belize.

Covid-19 variants are of grave concern, because several of them are more infectious forms of the virus, and that translates to more persons becoming seriously ill, and dying, even if the variants are not more deadly. Apart from the variants being more infectious or deadly is that they may be able to evade the vaccines that have just been developed. Initial studies indicate that one or more of the variants might possess all three undesirable characteristics.

Belize relaxing Covid-19 quarantine regulations

While these big countries are tightening their controls, Belize is going in the opposite direction. At a press conference called by the Ministries of Health and Wellness, and Home Affairs, Ministers Michel Chebat of the former and Kareem Musa of the latter, announced that there would be an easing of the restrictions. Belize had a particularly bad November and December, and new, tougher measures were introduced on December 20, 2020.

The measures were successful; the number of reported cases went down considerably in January. Significant changes beginning February 1 include a reduction in curfew hours, the curfew now beginning at 10:00 p.m. instead of 8:00 p.m.; reopening of gyms at 50% capacity, with gym patrons getting to workout by appointment only; reopening of the Free Zone in Corozal; churches being allowed to hold services at 50% capacity instead of a maximum of ten persons; and food vendors being allowed to sell their tacos and meat pies on the street sides again.

The Belizean economy is stagnating; Belizeans need to work so they can pay their bills, and the relaxation of the quarantine regulations is welcomed; however, we do have to throw up a caution flag for two areas: reopening of the Corozal Free Zone and the removal of the ten-person limit in the churches.

Reopening the Corozal Free Zone was a campaign promise of the new government; it is good that governments try to fulfill their manifestos, good that the owners of businesses at the Free Zone and their employees will get a chance to earn some money, but maybe, as Dr. Michael Pitts suggested when he appeared on the Krem WuB show recently, we should have held off just a little bit longer. Mexico saw a record spike in new coronavirus cases in January, and at least one case of one of the more contagious Covid-19 variants was found there last month.

The churches have been clamoring for the ten-person limit to be relaxed, and now 50% of their congregations will be allowed to celebrate their faith for one hour. We know that church isn’t church if the congregation doesn’t break out in song, but because of the times, they should accept being allowed to say, Amen, but not being permitted to sing, because not even N-95s can contain the breaths of congregants singing their hearts out for the Lord.

Restructure the tourism industry now

These new variants of SARS-CoV-2 are more bad news for our economy, particularly our tourism industry. While we are optimistic because of the success the Asian countries have had combating the virus, and because the speed with which modern medicine developed vaccines to give people the necessary immunity leads us to believe that it won’t take very long for it to produce booster shots to subdue the variants, we know we’ll need greater effort to endure, because the return of the tourists will be even further delayed.

While we wait for the return of the tourists, our priority is to survive, and the next thing on the table must be that we work on restructuring the industry so that Belizeans get a greater share.

Marlon Madden, writing in Barbados Today, said the president of the Barbados Economic Society, Simon Naitram, speaking as a panelist at the Central Bank of Barbados’ 40th annual review seminar, said, among other things, that as a driver of the Barbadian economy the tourism industry (as it existed before the pandemic) wasn’t doing a good job.
Mr. Naitram said: “You can almost think of it as your engine working and firing away, and yet the car is only rolling very slowly forward…ownership in the sector was highly concentrated and becoming increasingly foreign… (the industry) paid some of the lowest wages and provided volatile jobs.”

Mr. Naitram could have been speaking about tourism in Belize. Maybe we shouldn’t put a stop to the construction of mega hotels, because they do provide jobs, but the government must direct more of its energies toward the development and promotion of our small entrepreneurs, the architects of Belize’s tourism when we were really nature’s best kept secret.