7 News Belize

Belize And Mexico, Making Trade Work
posted (August 27, 2015)
One month ago, we told you about the moves that the Ministry of Trade was making to strengthen trade ties between Belize and Guatemala. They're also working on opening up trade relations with Belize's other neighbor, the one to the north: Mexico.

Today, BELTRAIDE hosted a conference between the producers and exporters all around the country to meet and speak with the regulators and trade facilitators from the Mexican Government and the private sector. Both sides are working on completing a platform that allows unimpeded access to the Mexican market with all the benefits, and none of the headaches.

We spoke with the CEO about the progress both countries have made, and how much further they have to go:

Mike Singh, CEO - Ministry of Trade
"The meeting today is a third in a series that we've been promoting for exporting Belizean products to different regions and through collaboration with the Belize Embassy in Mexico and through a lot of work put on their behalf, as well as collaboration with our group in Belize, we were able to put together a very high level team of experts from Mexico that will work with our exporters to understand market procedures, policies and hopefully help them with their quest to expand markets into Mexico."

"We have a group of experts; everything from Customs to Customs brokers association - all these people are going to be working talking to exporters about how to overcome barriers, how to look at markets, this like that. This workshop will inform us on some of the major topics that we need to include in our partial scope agreement. One hundred million people. That in itself tell you how big it will be, Belize is a primary producer of a lot of agricultural products. Mexico has grown to the point where there cost of producing primary products may not be as low as it was when they were focused on primary production. So that means that a lot of their products which are being exported via NAFTA into the United States and Canada, is taking up a lot of the volume. Which means that there is a void for their domestic market, so products like grains, cattle, meat products, and shrimp - all these products are better sourced from another country and Belize is finding that as our producers expand their production, that market is becoming more and more prevalent."

"Currently we our base really is agricultural products including cattle, grains, shrimp. However there are some exporters that are attending the session today that are interested in expanding their production in things like furniture, I think there is one gentleman that's doing a degreaser made of citrus bi-products. So there is interest in a lot of new products as well as services."

The Belizean exporters got an in depth lesson from the Mexican representatives on topics such as the Mexican market overview, niche markets and value generation.

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