And inside the House, the Minister for Indigenous Peoples Affairs gave a statement about the work that the PUP has done to move the 2015 judgement by the CCJ forward. In three years, she says they have made more progress than the previous 5 years under the UDP government, and yesterday, she told us more about how they have been putting the FPIC into practice when it comes to seismic testing in the south.
Dolores Balderamos Garcia, Minister of Human Development
"We have had a lot of good use of it since it was filed, I can give you the example of some electricity grids, we have consulted with the communities, also the US capital corporation that wished to do the seismic testing to test for presence of oil under the ground. Five out of the seven villages that have been consulted under the FPIC protocol have signed on to an agreement that they agree to the seismic testing to be done by US Capital Corporation. It took time, it took almost about a year and we're still waiting for two of the communities to sign on but I'm hoping that that can happen by the end of the year, so it took a while, but we believe that under the FPIC protocol, you know you can't file something and then not comply with it so under the FPIC protocol, it was important to bring the villagers in each village together."
"In relation to what we call the roadmap, what is the way forward for the implementation, that too we have seen some significant progress, we have had consultations on the Maya customary land tenure policy, we have had consultations extremely widely, I don't know if any proposed policy has been that widely consulted in the history of Belize and I have to give a big big up to the team that has carried forward those consultations."
"Today was not saying "rah rah" at all, it was giving a report of where we are. Again, I repeat, significant progress, but there's still a lot more to do, and we do expect that when everybody has their say, that not everybody will be completely happy but we will have to find a middle ground."
