And while poultry producers are feeling the pinch with current gas and grain prices, vegetable farmers took their hit in November of last year with the passage of of hurricanes Eta and Iota.
Those storms caused major flooding in western Belize late last year, and the after effects are still being felt by famers in the affected areas. Now, the Ministry of Agriculture is stepping in by giving them seedlings to revitalize their farms.
But that's not all, the Minister, Jose Mai, also tasked the Vegetable and Root Crop Production sector of the Ministry to come up with seedling mix made from local ingredients, as opposed to importing.
And today, Minister Mai toured the seedling nursery ahead of the distribution to the farmers.
Hon. Jose Abelardo Mai, Minister of Agriculture, Food Security and Enterprise
"These are various types of vegetable seedlings which were produced from the seeds that was given to us by OIRSA You will recall the two tropical storms IOTA and Eta and they did damage to our agriculture sector. OIRSA was kind enough to donate to us seeds. The ministry technicians were proposing to issue seeds to farmers. I told them that it is my view that we give them seedlings. So we prepared a budget for seedlings. You know you have to plant them out, there is a medium that you need to use and they were proposing to us to import seedling mix or potting mix. I disagree with that because we don't need to do that. So, we put our technicians to work and they came up with trials. They did different trials to get the best mix using our local sources here. So they use humus, soil, sand and it came up with the best medium and that gave us these plants. We still have in warehouse, about eighty, more than a hundred thousand seeds. They will put that in nurseries across the country."
"The problem right now is that we have to transport this to the districts. Transportation is a cost. So we are preparing the districts so that we can have these facilities and they can do what we are doing right here."
"This is in support of Covid. Instead of giving a bag of food, you give them seedlings for them to grow. It is also educating the persons out there and showing them that guess what, its not impossible to grow peppers in your back yard. It's not impossible to grow lettuce in your back yard, it can be done with a little effort."
Gary Ramirez, National Program Coordinator, Crop Production
"The work that has gone into this particular initiative is the development of our suitable soil mix to replace an imported germinating product which obviously has a cost for importing it and with this one we are able to use available soil mineral along with a little bit of sand and organic material to produce our own planting medium. That planting medium has now transition into us producing just over 18,000 seedlings here today which now becomes a part of an ongoing program for the ministry. Those seedlings will be produce here as well as our district stations for distributing to farmers for them to then go into production as well as home gardeners for them to engage in a little bit of food production at home."
According to Ramirez, approximately 150 farmers will get assistance from this program, which can be sustained for at least the next 12 months.
