Viewers will remember how the communities in the Cayo District were in serious distress around this time last year. That was due to major forest fires in the Vaca Forest Reserve, Caracol Archaeological Reserve, and Chiquibul National Park. According to the Friends for Conservation and Development, just over 22 thousand, 2 hundred acres of forest were destroyed by fire, and it took major effort from regular civilians, the Forestry Department, the Fire Department, the Towns, and City Councils, and many other partner organizations, including PACT, BECOL, and multiple conservation NGO's, to get those fires under control.
AND, this year, the dry season is already causing very hot days, and according to the FCD, small forest fires have started popping up in the protected areas. Today, the Executive Director told our colleagues from Krem News that they have engaged in an information campaign for farming communities in Belize and Guatemala to be very careful about their slash and burn practices:
Rafael Manzanero, Executive Director, FCD
"Our concern has been of course the out of control fires that can occur as the dry weather comes in. Like last year we saw a whole set of fires that were occurring off the landscape Chiquibul, Caracol - all around. So were highly concern that during the dry weather we would also have a high peak season of forest fires. At FCD what we started to do was basically to conduct a public outreach in terms of educating the farmers particularly around the area of the VACA that would include the farmers from Arenal, Benque Viejo Succotz who are basically operating nearby or inside of that reserve and something important was that it had to be a national effort. We also had the community outreach reaching out to the communities across in Guatemala. In terms of reaching out there to the rural communities in terms of reducing any forest fires along that particular landscape."
"In terms of our enforcement we are currently monitoring the landscape particularly the VACA area where we felt there was going to be a more pronounced activity of fire. I sent you a map where you can see small forest fires in the VACA up to 48-50 of those areas considered as hotspots inside of the VACA forest reserve. So that is what we have been documenting and of course we have limited man power there, but the idea was to monitor and be able to suppress along with the farmers if there were any wild fires around that zone."
Last year, the Barrow Government passed a statutory instrument, which made it illegal to start fires on public or private land during the State of Emergency.
