Click here to print
Funds For Farmer's
Thu, August 27, 2020

The Barrow Administration currently has the Unemployment Relief and the Food Assistance programs running to aid poor Belizeans who lost their jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic. They also in the process of assessing business owners who applied for help under the Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises program. And now, they've launched a government aid program to help the nation's farmers who continue to be devastated by the pandemic.

It's called the Farmer Assistance program, and with 8 million US dollars from the World Bank, the government is hoping to help more than 8,700 agricultural households in the country. This money was part of another loan from the Bank, but it has now been re-allocated to fund the Farmer Assistance Program.

And to share details on how it will work, Agriculture Minister Godwin Hulse and his technical team hosted a virtual press conference, which lasted for 100 minutes. 7News tuned in, and here's what the Minister had to say about how this program works, and who the beneficiaries are. Here's what he had to say this morning:

Hon. Godwin Hulse - Ministry of Agriculture

"Our Ministry is very, very pleased to announce that we have finally concluded the negotiations with the World Bank for 16 million Belize dollars of loan funds to provide relief to farmers who were impacted and affected by market contraction caused by COVID-19, those who suffered losses from the prolonged drought of 2019, and additionally, Ministry will provide assistance to vegetable farmers to improve the post-harvest handling of the product, and provide financial support - that is cash transfer to all female farmers. And I'll say if we had an audience, we would certainly be clapping for this because there are 2,052 female farmers who will each - 1, receive $500 in assistance. That is to encourage and promote women in agriculture. As you know, females in many cases are heads of households and the backbone of our food and nutrition. We do have a female farmer of the year, and so, we included - in this relief - every single female farmer who is registered on our BAIMS list. In addition to that, we will be providing this cash transfer to 5,372 farmers totally - of which 2052 are a part. And those are farmers with farms smaller than 20 acres down. That is how we are doing this. It is a cash transfer. You all will know that BAIMS is one of the programs we are extremely proud of. It's the Belize Agricultural Information Management System. And this was launched a couple of years ago in its making, and we perfected over the year. The reason for that is that we would not have been able to do this had we not have a register for farmers, pure and simple. This register was used by the World Bank in meticulous detail to arrive at the disbursements that we will make. Now in determining the allocation of funds, farmers were categorized in small, medium, and large. The bulk of the funds are targeted at small and medium farmers. At this juncture, I need to point out that there is another World Bank fund of 25 million US dollars - that's 50 million dollars - project, which is providing support primarily to medium and large commercial farmers, to assist with climate-smart agriculture adaptation measures, and to respond to climate changes."
Close this window