The New World Screw Worm (NWSW), which has reached our neighbors to the south and west, Guatemala, and Mexico in the north, has the potential to cause great harm to our livestock industry. While the NWSW is not as destructive as diseases caused by bacterial agents that have devastated our citrus and shrimp industries, it has our livestock owners concerned about the days ahead. Already, some ranchers in Mexico are calling on their government to stop importing cattle on the hoof from Belize; and the US, which had to contain an NWSW infestation in Florida in 2016/17, has closed its border to imports of livestock from Mexico after the fly was detected in an animal in Chiapas.
The NWSW was eradicated from our region through a program spearheaded by the US Department of Agriculture. The costly program—a report from the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica said US$200 million was spent to eradicate the fly from Central America — involved producing millions of sterile male flies and dispersing them into the wild, where their mating with female flies produced no offspring.
The adult stage of the NWSW (a fly) can travel miles without any help from the wind, and the animals they parasitize are not known to respect borders. Ministry of Agriculture personnel and the Belize Agricultural Health Authority anticipate that the NWSW will reach Belize and infest our livestock, and to mitigate the damage/contain the pest, they have made ranchers and other livestock owners across the country aware of the seriousness of the threat, and have established a protocol for prevention, and measures to take immediately if the fly is detected.
Presently, Belize exports cattle on the hoof to Mexico, via a formal arrangement, and to Guatemala, via informal trade. The hope is that our neighbors will not go beyond putting in more stringent measures for cattle they import from Belize. The worst, a halt to exports of cattle from Belize, would be a major setback for the industry. Our farmers would lose money, our country would have decreased earnings of foreign exchange, and those blows would lead to increased hardship for us all. We’ve had our share of that these past several years. The pandemic, and wars in Europe and in the Middle East, have led to massive inflation, upwards of 30% for many products, and climate extremes have also hit our economy hard.
Ranchers and personnel in the Finance and Agriculture ministries must have already begun exploring initiatives to defend cattle ranchers if our export markets shrink or dry up because of the recent NWSW outbreak. It happens oftentimes that problems are a catalyst for progress. Presently, we only ship cattle on the hoof, but there might be viable markets out there for processed meat and all the other products that can be made from cattle.
While our experts are exploring those possibilities, we, the people, should be about exploring the changes we can and must make to help our farmers, and ourselves. Our small population can’t consume the entire national herd, but cattle farmers will need us to eat more beef. Fortunately, most of our cattle eat grass, and grass-fed cattle is a very healthy meat.
Reduced cattle sales abroad means less “pesos and quetzals” to pay for imports of “pigtail.” While respecting the reciprocal nature of business—our responsibility to buy from, give preference to, countries that purchase the goods we produce—there is the real constraint of not having the money to buy pigtails, a not-so-healthy meat that we have made into a near sacred staple. We can choose to sulk, or we can cheerfully forego the pigtail addiction and eat/season the pot with saal beef labeled, “Made in Belize”. It takes more preparation, but we can substitute canned meat with fresh beef. Of course, if we are called on to eat more beef, grateful ranchers should not feed us old cows. We Belizeans want the same fatted calves that would be going to Mexico and Guatemala if there wasn’t a resurgence of the NWSW.
Government leads, but only the people can save the people
There are hard facts that we Belizeans must face. Economist/engineer, Bill Lindo has warned us repeatedly that we cannot sustain our appetite for foreign goods through the sale of primary products and tourism. Profitably converting our primary products into storable goods is a complex issue. The main limiting factor is the small size of our market, which is further constricted by our appetite for competing foreign products. Thus far, our response to the increased prices for foreign goods, which we are addicted to and rely on, has been to purchase less.
Reducing our consumption of imported products isn’t a choice we made eagerly. We’ll have to do better. We need to start looking for local products with fervor. We should wear sackcloth for the lukewarm support we gave to the local peanut butter, Gabela. We nipped our budding peanut industry when we spurned the far healthier local product because it wasn’t smooth like the imported Skippy, and because we had to stir the contents if it was on the shelf too long.
There really isn’t much more that we can do with tourism. That’s a pie we can only dream of getting a bigger bite of. We need to get our heads out of the clouds, come to grips with the fact that the rest of the world doesn’t operate the way we do. The people in the rest of the world spend their money with their own. If we want tourists from Italy, Italians must have a big bite in the industry, or they will go elsewhere, to places where people from their country get a big bite out of the business. That’s the way of the world.
The Deputy Prime Minister, Hon. Cordel Hyde commented this week about the struggles Belizeans face with the high price of goods, and the high price of rent in urban areas; and he noted what government is doing to address the former, and the need to come up with a solution for the latter.
The countries that sell products to us have jacked up their prices, some of that for very legitimate reasons, and they aren’t about lowering it to please us. Added to that is the merciless gouging of consumers by some shopkeepers. Hyde said government was increasing its emphasis on preventing shopkeepers from unfairly raising their prices, and he called on us to pass by those businessfolk that price gouge and don’t invest in their neighborhoods.
On the matter of extremely high rents in urban areas, that’s a particularly difficult cat to bell in a free market. Years ago, our government invested in apartments and subsidized the rent, a blueprint the present government might follow. But, so as not to hurt the investments of people who rent to earn a living, the apartments should be accessed only by those of us who can prove that we don’t have the cash to pay.
The high cost of living is hitting most of us hard; the ship Belize is sailing in very strong headwinds. There are a number of laudable government initiatives, particularly the increased stimulus for small businesses. Our government leaders would earn more points if they introduced more creative strategies to give our entrepreneurs an edge. At the same time, entrepreneurs must be considerate of the protection they are gifted from government, and never be mercenary. Our people are as talented and energetic as people anywhere, but success as a country will elude us until we start looking out for each other. There is opportunity in crises. Government must lead the way, but at the end of the day, only the people can save the people.