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And the PM reiterated that the government will not be arbitrarily increasing the price of sugar, especially since it will never be able to match Mexico's sky high prices. But he also explained that the government is trying to identify the wholesalers who are allowing the sugar to be smuggled across the border.
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"We also have a social responsibility to the Belizean consumers, one. Secondly, we cannot compete with the prices across in Chetumal. The brown sugar that is being sold that we sell for 24 cents a pound is being sold for $2 a pound in Chetumal so if you want to say we have to raise the prices over there to stop the contraband, it's not going to happen, we're not going to do it. But thirdly it's also not fair on the cane farmers who have been, in effect, subsidizing sugar for the rest of our consumers. And so the fourth point I would like to make is that what he has said, the minister, is that now we have to find a formula where we could justify an increase where it can assist the farmers and help to try to see how best we could slow down a bit the attempt to contraband but also we have to work on enforcement and there's a number of things and what he was saying, price control has been going to these supermarkets and telling them, who do they buy their sugar from? They want to trace from the store to wholesaler to BSI and by doing that, what you call reverse engineering, we'll be able to see who of these wholesalers are not seeing to the local stores and then after that we can go to BSI and say, look, these people are not selling the sugar on the local market, they are allowing it to be contraband."
"Also we have to try and tighten as much as we possibly can our borders but you know our borders are porous. We have a very large border and you can cross at any point in our border, so it's a number of things we have to take into consideration and it's not just a clear cut, oh just raise the price, because that's not something we would do, just raise it to stop the contraband into Mexico and Guatemala."
