And while BRICENO lamented the state of the national debt and the economy, the livestock producers are doing their part to jumpstart exports.
After a very long meeting today between the BLPA and the Minister of Agriculture, Food Security, and Enterprise, we can tell you that over 600 cattle have been transported through the west for the informal trade. These animals have been sitting in the pastures for months, putting a massive strain on the farmers. The farmers are now grateful to the Ministry for allowing them to continue the trade, and according to the chairman of BLPA, Ramon Galveston, they are also looking into formalizing the trade. But, while that is good news, the producers have another problem on their hands: flooding.
Ramon Galveston - Chairman, BLPA "In the last 5 to 6 days, we have released about 650 plus head of cattle and that comes from the sector that was suffering, those sectors that were urging to sell cattle. Remember that we were close down, we were lockdown and first the dry weather was on top of us and people were desperate to release those animals because of shortage of grass. Then we had some little rains and grass and all of a sudden we have floods, so another desperation to release cattle because too much water also affects the grass, it's get saturated and they stampede it too much that the grass gets all mucky, so we have to release some cattle right now because of too much rain. Once we get the permission to trade the cattle, then we have better control because you know when people have their cattle ready and want to sell they find a way to sell it and if we are denied that, then people will find a way somehow through some little door being that you don't have control of what is going out, then we can even lose our registry but by putting those check points there, we monitor what's going out and we keep our registry intact."
Reporter "In your meeting today, was there any discussions to start to move towards more formal trading while keeping this informal trading open?"
Ramon Galveston "Definitely, we spoke about the way forward with the minister and his group that came to meet with us and we talked about already trying to get to have a record of what is going out and what is trying to see if the government were getting any tax from it and there is a record and we thought that they had met with customs and they want to include the police and even immigration, so that they are aware of what we are doing and we do it properly."
Galveston expects the roughly the same amount of cattle to be taken to the west in the upcoming week.
