Today Minister of Agriculture Rene Montero and Belize Rural North Area Rep. Edmund Castro visited the Fresh Catch tilapia farm and processing plant near La Demoracia. But it was more than just a tour of the Mena enterprises – it was a working visit as both sides explored possibilities for a private and public sector collaboration. Montero explained.
Hon. Rene Montero, Minister of Agriculture
“Tilapia has been part of the new government’s vision of trying to create employment for our people, trying to create income generation for our people, and we feel that this level of investment, we would want to transfer this to the farm level. We see a vision of satellite farmers in the area producing tilapia and bringing it here to the processing plant because we all know the demand for fish worldwide is huge and just across the border in Guatemala, Mexico, and the US – it is a huge market that we want to tap into.”
Emil Mena, Fresh Catch
“Fresh Catch Belize is always open to receive and train people from the region, from the areas in Belize. We believe that in developing the tilapia industry in Belize, we have to keep a couple things in mind. We have to maintain a standard and we have to make sure that those farmers that decide to go tilapia do it the right way so that they don’t lose money.”
Hon. Edmund Castro, Belize Rural North Area Rep.
“I am very pleased to see the level of production that Mena and his company, Fresh Catch, is doing out here in terms of tilapia and I would like to see many more production like this because this is the kind of thing that will help our government, it will help our people, it will help even the small farmers that we are trying to do something with in the Belize Rural North area as well.”
The Fresh Catch farm has 600 acres of tilapia under production and is working on an additional 400 acres. They export about 2,000 pounds of tilapia annually.
