And Maya King is big part of Belize’s Gross Domestic Product. Since the Kingpin designation put Belize’s most productive banana farm out of commission, Banana exports have struggled. Â
Today, the news from the Statistical Institute of Belize was that the GDP grew modestly in the second quarter of the year, even though Banana exports were down. Here’s a clip from their press conference outlining the figures, and posting to a few key developments in the economy:
Angelita Campbell - Statistician II
"For the second quarter of 2017 Belize produced goods and services totaling 737 million dollars, an increase of 8 million dollars when compared to the same period of last year. For the first 6 months of 2017 we saw an increase of 1.1 percent or 16.5 million dollar increase when compared to the same period of last year. We have an increase in agriculture hunting and forestry of 4.2 percent of 3 million. Sugar cane delivered increased by 19.4 percent as production price increased. We have livestock also recording an increase of 1.4 percent as pig and cattle production both increased due to market demands and prices. Citrus production also recorded an increase of 31.9 percent due to a 35.4 percent in the number of oranges delivered as a result of late blooming of the fruits. On the other hand we had a decline in banana production of 16 percent. We have a 19 thousand metric ton of bananas being produced an decrease from 23 thousand metric tons due to the plant not producing the amount of fruit expected for this quarter. Beverage production recorded a decrease as mentioned before of roughly 13.5 percent and we see a decline in beer production due to demand as well as soft drink production was hampered due to the importation of soft drinks.
But those tourists mostly drink the local brew, and there were a lot more overnight visitors in the first half of 2017, than there were in 2016. But, the perplexing part is that hotel occupancy was down by 10%! So where are all this oversight visitors staying? That's what we asked:..
Angelita Campbell
"We have hotel and restaurant decreasing by 2.4 percent. Though we have overnight visitors increasing by 4.2 percent that was offset by cruise passengers going down by 4.8 percent and room revenue actually going down by 10.8 percent. Currently we do have more persons coming into the country but they are more budget visitors so there are not staying necessarily at the larger hotels or the hotels where we have known in our system, where BTB gets the information from in terms of room revenue. Currently we're working on that since the AirBnB and Couch surfers have taken over the industry in such vastly we are currently now working to see how we can get the information from that area of tourists visitors.
