Since the findings of the 2010 census were officially presented at the end of April, there have been murmurs of dissatisfaction and even howls of disapprobation form those who don't agree with the findings.
One Cabinet Minister and area representative for Belize Rural South Manuel Junior Heredia even said that the population estimate for his Island of San Pedro were just plain wrong.
Well today the minister rof the Public Service John Saldivar addressed the House on the census and said that his colleague Heredia is the one that's wrong:
Hon. John Saldivar
"Preliminary indications are that the 2010 under count rate will not exceed 4% or 13,000 persons. It should be noted that while the aim of the census was to count everybody living in Belize, it was impractical for the census takers to interview each person as this would have taken eternity since it would be highly unlikely that all members of a household would be present at the time of the census takers visit. With less than 80,000 household counted it is not far fetch that only one quarter of the population was interviewed. The assertion that San Pedro Ambergris Caye has more than twice the population reported is inaccurate, as it would suggest that San Pedro is almost as big as Orange Walk town and Belmopan City combined. This is impossible, regarding the second concerns surrounding the unemployment rate - it should be noted that the unemployment rate is a time sensitive economic indicator. In other words there can be significant variations in this rate from one month to another especially for an economy like Belize's where activities in sugar, citrus and tourism industries are seasonal. With most of the census field work occurring during the off peak periods of these three industries and schools summer vacation period as was the case ten years ago - it is expected that the unemployment rate would be higher than that at other times of the year. To observe that the national unemployment rate has only increase by 2.8 percentage points from 20.3% in 2000 to 23.1% in 2010 is significant given that our country is still reeling from the effects of the global economic crisis. The discussion on the findings on the 2010 census is very healthy. Criticism and skepticism are welcome because it forces introspection and improvement in how we do things and how we explain things to the public. If it was not known before the Statistical Institute of Belize now knows that we have a more attuned public who must now be convinced of the accuracy of any exercise or statistic presented by the institute."
Interestingly, to bolster his argument of census accuracy in San Pedro, Saldivar used Ministry of Education figures to compare primary school enrollment in Orange Walk and Belmopan - which was about three thousand for each of those towns, with San Pedro which was just one thousand.
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