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And while the citrus industry is transforming, coconuts will soon also be exported to Mexico. According to Mai, they've been trying to discuss the possibilities for sometime, but were met with obstacles. So he decided to head north himself to speak with his counterpart in Mexico, and they managed to come to an agreement.
Jose Mai, Minister of Agriculture
"We just got back from Mexico yesterday. My technical team and I, um, including Baha. Why? Because we had already,
um, requested from Mexico that we had interest in supplying coconut to their markets. We have companies in Mexico wants to buy coconuts, green coconuts in different forms. It could be green whole or green peeled right, or dry coconuts. Mexico's policy right, was no to coconuts at all. The bureaucracy in all countries, including Belize, is sometimes very, very frustrating. We're not moving forward as fast as we want to. I propose to the Prime Minister that the only way to do this is to go face to face and deal with people and, uh, secretary of Agriculture, Villalobos, who is a friend of mine, and even the president had said to me, if you have any problems, come see me, we'll deal with it. These Zoom meetings and telephone calls, sometimes it is not as effective as you want it to. So I armed my team and we went to Mexico. We were well received by the Senasica people. Senasica is equivalent to Baha in Mexico, and we show them where our problems were and whey we couldn't get certain responses and just before we left, we got the correspondence saying that coconuts are allowed now, right? But it has to be, remove the green part of it. But why? Because they don't want the coconuts to be used as as planting material, right? So if you remove that, then you can't use it for planting material. But we are also looking at dry coconuts. Dry coconuts, again, if you take a dry coconut, um, there are regulations to that and I don't want that either. But they left the door open for us to establish new protocols for that. So my team is working on that right away."
