The downturn in Belize's major agricultural exports was quantified in today's press conference by the Statistical Institute of Belize. Here are how they performed in the second quarter from April to June:
Christopher Hulse, Statistician
"From 793,000 metric tons to 647.8,000 metric tons, this is an 18.3% decrease and this is attributed to adverse weather, lack of cane cutters and some aspects of the frog hopper pests. Then banana from 27.6,000 metric tons to 16.5,000 metric tons, this is a decrease of 40% as the continued cost of inputs, disease pressure, adverse weather and the labor shortage continues to affect banana for the past quarters."
"We look at citrus from 26.7,000 metric tons to 1.9,000 metric tons, this is a 93.1% decrease and again it continues to be plagued with citrus greening, the shortage of labor, high cost of inputs and we observe that most of the land is being diversified into other crops."
