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Today, a Guatemalan Technical Delegation was in Belize led by the Vice Minister of Agriculture from the Department of Peten, Juan Carlos Barquin.
They're here to learn about citrus farming - and while Belize's industry is in steep decline, there're still many lessons to be learned because Belize has seen it all:
Jose Mai, Minister of. Agriculture
"The Guatemalans don't have a citrus industry. They want to start and they have asked us to support them. In giving them technical assistance, technical advice, how to begin."
"They have to begin from scratch. We have a history, we have very good experience in doing this, we have some of the best people trained. In the citrus industry. And they have come to learn from us."
"And when it comes to workers though, we know that in some cases, a lot of these workers come from Guatemala. That may pose a challenge, is there a consideration there?"
"Yeah I think the entire region has a labour shortage right now. I was in Costa Rica the other day and in Honduras.All the Hondurans that used to do the manual work there are now in the US and so the entire region has a labour shortage, Mexico has a labour shortage."
In the afternoon, the Ministry took their guests to Caves Branch to visit model Citrus Groves with new disease resistant strains.
Belize's citrus industry is over a century old. We'll have more of our conversation with Minister Mai about int challenges in tomorrow's newscast.
