And today, Minister Mai signed an MOU for the Climate Resilient and Sustainable Agriculture project. It's aimed at assisting small and large farmers who are being affected by the effects of climate change - whether that be hot and dry weather, or too much rainfall.
Today, he explained that farmers are seeing an array of issues affecting their crops, and that CRESAP will be implementing new technologies to combat these.
Jose Mai, Minister of Agriculture
"With climate change, the sector that is being affected the most is agriculture, this project will intend to find ways to mitigate the effects of climate change and there are different technologies that we use and so this project will provide the farmers with those services. $16 million of the $25 million is grant for the farmers, we have the small farmer component and the big farmer component and so this project is important for the sustainable development of agriculture in the country."
Courtney Menzies:
"What are some of the problems they have been reporting to you?"
Jose Mai, Minister of Agriculture
"Well, you said it right, droughts is one, excess rainfall, you have rainfall, not only excess rainfall, but you have rainfall when you shouldn't have rainfall, and we have, as a result of that, we have increases in pest and diseases, for example in the bananas down south, we have increase in Sigatoka, we have new pests for example we have the Asian Bean Thripe, the Megalurothrips, which showed up in Belize unknowingly so we have lots of incidences like these, for example, in pasture right now. The past few months, we had excess rainfall which affected the growth of grass pastures and then immediately we had dry coming, real dry and so the pastures did not even recover after excess moisture and now it's being affected by drought so right now at this moment we see that the cattle farmers are going to see losses as of now, you see the cattle losing weight and so these are the effects of the weather patterns which I must say to you, we should all be guilty of not managing our resources well and so this project will address that."
And the project coordinator went more in-depth with the different components of the project. Chief Meteorologist Ronald Gordon, who also signed the MOU, explained their role as well.
The budget for the National MET Service's component is 300,000 US dollars.
