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The press wasn't allowed in, but the Two chairmen of the Economic Development Council spoke with the media outside this evening. Here's what they had to say:

Kay Menzies - Co-chair, Economic Development Council
"I think the members of the private sector who sat on the panels did a fairly good job of explaining what they are doing in terms new technology and so on but also the constraints that they face that generally business encounters in trying to get ahead and trying to fulfil our role in growing the economy. the point of this whole forum is for the public and private sector to work together to grow the economy, so that we can benefit all Belizeans but both sides face difficulties with which we can help each other and that was one reason for mixing the panels, but also the private sector folks had an opportunity to say, look these are the issues I am facing, these are the ways you can address it and I can get ahead if we do that."

Mike Singh - Co-chair, Economic Development Council
"Forum in October where we wanted to have a business session to get an idea of what we the real current issues are that people want to see address because we found that the last forum, we spent a lot of time fleshing out and discussing issues that were never here before and with the Prime Minister's time, you haven't seen him in the forum - he's very interactive. He gets very involve in the discussion. We wanted to make the most of it this time, so we thought if we had a session before, really extract some of the pertinent issues of the day and spent the next 2 to 3 months fleshing those issues out issues, so that when we have the discussion with him with these issues, we could just get down to business and hopefully make some very efficient decisions."

As we said, the issues raised today will form the focus of the Prime Minister's Business forum, which takes place on October 8. One issue for entrepreneurs was the still high cost of internet bandwidth, even though the prices have gone down in recent years.