And while Mai questioned the cessation of Cattle exports, agriculture C.E.O Servulo Baeza is trying to oversee the resuscitation of the export of raw citrus concentrate.
Citrus production has been on a steady decline with the current estimates for annual crops at 2 million boxes, a fifth of the 10 million that would have been the norm in Citrus's heyday.
It's one of the reason's he's advocating the re-thinking of shipping out the raw material to instead focus on manufacturing end products for export. This afternoon he spoke to the Press office about how the Citrus industry is being restructured.
Servulo Baeza, C.E.O Agriculture
"The Minister has appointed Mr. Hugh O'Brien to be the chairman of that group, he is the previous C.E.O. of the Ministry, we have the two associations and Belize mutual, Belize growers association, and some of the financial institutions that also have vested interests in the industry, DFC and so on, so we're ensuring that we have all stakeholders and the processing plant CPBL, so we have all the interested stakeholders in this working group."
"One to look at the reason, the causes of the low production and to look at trying to increase production, to look at the financial constraints and see how we can try to also come with concrete suggestions to how we can have investment or new injection of capital into the sector and secondly to ensure that we can revive and re-vitalize the citrus industry, not only from the production part but also looking at the plant itself that produces the juices. We cannot continue and that's one of the things that we have to look at, we cannot continue exporting just the concentrate, again we need to start looking at value-adding doing different things and I know the plant is looking at Pineapple, you have other juices."
"Increasing our sugar production reviving the industry so that it can create foreign exchange. That trickles down to farmers, to people working in the industry, creating employment, economic activity, so it's an overall trickledown effect and the multiplier effect for the economy."
