This morning, the Statistical Institute of Belize held its third press conference for the year 2022. The purpose was to update the public on key trends that have emerged in the performance of the country's economy for the months of April to June.
The GDP - or gross domestic product - is used as the main indicator to assess the health of an economy. And according to the SIB, there was a major 13.5% growth of GDP in the second quarter of this year when compared to the same time period last year.
For a closer look at how some of the nation's biggest industries performed for the second quarter, here's more from Statistician II Christopher Hulse:
Christopher Hulse - Statistician II
"Goods and services produced a total of 1.32 billion for the months of April to June. This is an increase of $156.9 million, or 13.5% growth when you compare that to the second quarter of 2021. If we look at the first six months of 2022 and compare that to the first six months of 2021, we see an 11% growth."
"Now, I said that the GDP is spread across the three sectors, and this is how those sectors contributed to that GDP. So the tertiary sector continues to be the largest part of our GDP or the biggest contributor. So if you see the tertiary sector here, it's basically around 60 to 62% of our GDP is from the services, right? Primary is 7.8%. The secondary is 16%, and the tax on the GDP is 13.7%."
"So, as I said in the previous slide, the primary contributed $101.3 million to the total GDP. This is a decline of $8.7 million compared to the second quarter and 2021, or a decline of 7.9%. The industries that make up the primary, which are agriculture, forestry, fishing, and mining, all saw decreases, with agriculture decreasing by 5.6% and mining by 20.5%."
"So we start with sugar cane. In 2021, for the second quarter, sugar cane production was at 937.2 thousand metric tons compared that to 2022. Quarter two: that is 793,000 metric tons. This is a decrease of 15.4%, and this is attributed to a lot of stand-over crops that is crops that remained in the field right there. The latest report I have shows about 100,000 tonnes were lost from January to where we are now."
"In the case of banana production, we saw an 11% decrease from 28.6 thousand metric tonnes produced in the second quarter of 2021 to 25.5 thousand metric tonnes produced in the second quarter of 2022. The reason for this crop timing there was a drastic increase in input costs, which is the fuel and the fertilizer. So the per acre yield was affected by that, and then they had a labor shortage in the field for harvest. So a lack of manpower."
"Now, moving on to livestock, we saw a small decrease of 3%, driven by cattle, which fell by 24.2%. But it was offset by pig growing by 11.9% and poultry by 14.5%. I'll now look at each livestock in the next couple of slides. All right. So starting with cattle, cattle again went down from 11.1 thousand heads in quarter two of 2021 to 8.4 thousand heads in part two of 2022."
Other outstanding statistics in the gross domestic product for the second quarter include beverages and rum. Soft drinks are up by 10%, while beer is up by 34%. Rum had the biggest increase at 191%.
