In urban areas such as Belize City, fire is AWLAYS a bad thing, but in rural farming communities, fire is a major part of the harvesting cycle. But, you know what they say about playing with fire, and in the past three years, many of those agricultural fires have escaped and accidentally burned 6,300 acres of forests and also led to the destruction of crops and private property. So the Ya'axché Conservation Trust is teaching farmers how to use fire more effectively. It's called controlling agricultural burns, and on Thursday, Ya'axché partnered with its sister organization, Toledo Institute for Development and Environment (TIDE), to hold a one-day fire management training in Golden Stream village. 12 farmers participated and here's what they learned:
Stephanie Smith - Fire Program Officer, Ya' axche'
"Today was a training activity to train the community members and how to better manage their agricultural fires in order to avoid them escaping from areas that they are trying to burn."
Osmundo Cal - Participant. Golden Stream
"I'm afraid to burn people farms, because they have a lot of farm around me. That's why I need to do training to make me learn more. This is my first time I'm doing this from since I am a farmer for 20 years, but this is my first time I start to do training."
Augustine Chub - Participant. Big Falls
"This gives me encouragement to work with some other people and its working good. It's going well. Instead of creating a problem with neighbors or other people, this is the way to work with the people so that we could work friendly with other neighbors and so, because if we don't tell other people how to start fire then we have been to court or charged or whatsoever. So if we do this, I think this will help the farmers to be nice to other people."
Mario Muschamp - Fire Expert, TIDE
"The idea is to ensure that the people that use fire, use it wisely that lessen those escape fires from the agricultural grounds to ensure that the biodiversity of these areas remains intact. That's the bottom line behind what we are doing here with fire. Like I mentioned, we can't do it alone. It's only together with great collaboration, the NGOs, the regulatory agency and the community working to achieve that goal and I think we are on the right track with these types of training and building these communities' capacity so that they can use fires."
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