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And, keeping it in southern waters, the Belize Women's Seaweed Farmers Association from Placencia spoke to us more about two grant projects they are working on in an attempt to further expand their work and organization. Up to 63 thousand dollars have been invested into training and purchasing equipment. Their members gave us more details.
Jalima Gold, BWSFA
"So the British high commission, we are currently doing a project with them. This project will enable us to expand our farms by three plots where we will be training seven hopefully women, but anyone in our community to be captains and we will also be getting a powder machine so we can get seaweed in different kinds of forms for our members to use."
"The powder machine will be used, right now we do not have I guess you can say an industrial sized order machine where we can get the dry seaweed and get it into a fine powder so there are a few different reasons for this where part of is for storage so we can have a lot of seaweed and we can keep it for longer and we can store it. Another part of that is for members who make value added products can then use that powder in their products and make different products for it."
Maximiliano Cal, Project manager consultant, BWSFA
"Like for the Belize women's seaweed farmers association it's a little bit over four years since we have been established and as you know grassroots organizations they require a lot of support and we are very grateful in terms of the support we have received over the years. Institutionally it is very difficult to establish an organization such as the Belize women's farmers association. So the Belize fund for a sustainable future is doing that now it is meeting us at the middle ground and saying you know what we can help you and we do need the help and so the focus of that project is to establish the association as an organization it is something we have been hoping for. The association was registered just before COVID, COVID came and made a lot of challenges for us so for us we are not only improving the way we operate as an organization but we are also improving our farming practices. The seaweed we are farming is of high quality and we are also looking at how we can increase the value of our seaweed. Internationally dead weed is being sold for 2 US dollars, locally we are selling at 15 US dollars per pound so that is a very important part of our work ensuring that the value remains and the money remains in Belize."
