The Global Environmental Fund's small grants program today handed over $22,000 to the Cayo Quality Honey Producers' Cooperative. You can call it honey money since the funds will be used by the organization to improve its production. You may be wondering how an environmental grant can go to a cooperative. Today we traveled to the village of Santa Familia to find out how making honey, is also preserving the environment.
Alfonso Noble Reporting,
Sebastian Tun took us on a tour of his apiary in the branch mouth area of Santa Familia Village in the Cayo District. Tun has been keeping bees for the past 30 years and his apiary is a model from which other beekeepers are learning the trade. Today the Global Environmental Facility through its small grants program handed over a check of $22,000 to the Cayo Quality Honey Producers' Society. The grant is to support beekeeping because it's environmentally friendly. Environmental program officer at UNDP Diane Wade Moore explains.
Diane Wade-Moore,
"This was seen as a win-win situation because as a pollinator, these honeys are very important for the surrounding and for a lot of the crops around this area. And also it provides the members of this cooperative with a livelihood alternative that does not, it is not a destructive one. It does not call for the cutting down of trees and things of nature and the application of fertilizer and pesticides. So the whole idea is it is supposed to be as environmentally friendly as possible."
For the honey producers this is important because the areas in which they will be establishing their apiaries are buffer regions to protected areas in the Cayo District.
Diane Wade-Moore,
"They will be working the buffer regions for certain protected areas. We will see a group of people benefiting from natural resources without having have to go in and destroy the base of that resource."
And while the GEF and its Small Grants Program targets such environmentally friendly practices and tries to help organizations, for the beekeepers it means much needed funding for growth. Eliodoro Perez is the Chairman of the Cooperative. He says today's first disbursement of $22,000 will be used to procure equipment for the producers to begin their work immediately.
Eliodoro Perez, Chairman of Cooperative
"We have need to get some new materials, get everything to go forward because what is holding us back is the money and right now that we got this first grant, we will get the material and we will get everything that we need so that we could help the new beekeepers. We are not playing, we want to expand. We want to expand the honey industry and we will have honey for the Belizean people. Plenty people from Belize know, I sell honey in Belize, and I promise to the Belize people that we will have pure honey, 100% good honey for our Belize people.
We have a need that our people, our Belizean people, need honey and we know that several people are bringing honey from the next side of the border and we have beekeepers in Belize who have the capacity to work with the bees, have knowledge, and we are now joining to work and to produce honey from the bees. And like how I told you, we have already gotten the buffers from the reserve to put the bees and that is good for the jungle, honey from the jungle."
Sebastian Tun has that very vision and he says that with assistance from GEF and other donor agencies the cooperative and more importantly himself as a beekeeper will see exponential growth.
Sebastian Tun, Beekeeper
"I think we will have a better chance because we are getting the support of this project and I think that my next friends, the beekeepers, will do the same like what we have done here. I think Belize will have a good industry of honey. I am planning to expand this to at least one thousand hives myself."
Alfonso Noble,
What will that mean for you personally?
Sebastian Tun,
"Well I will be a rich man. I will be a rich man. That is the dream of the beekeepers, to come out of the poverty. We are poor people so we need to come out from the poverty and change our lives and provide jobs to the youths that they will come because they will be the one that will manage the apiaries, the youths, the children."
While the grant disbursement by the GEF small grants program was $22,000 the total amount to be awarded to the cooperative is $76,550.
