The Maya Mountain Forest Reserve is a 36,000 acre site situated in southern Belize. It's where the Hummingbird Group Limited has gotten permits and licenses to conduct logging activities sustainably. As the founder, Bobby Lopez, explained, there are some trees they can cut and some that must be left alone to ensure that the reserve lives on. But when his workers went into the reserve recently, they noticed other loggers without the necessary permits - which alarmed them since they were engaged in cutting down trees and drawing survey lines. Yesterday, Lopez told us more about the encounter.
Bobby Lopez, Founder, Hummingbird Group Limited
"Now that we're in the reserve, putting in our roads and everything is monitored by the Forestry Department. They're very, very strict with these long term sustainable forestry licenses. We come upon about a week ago a group of men in the reserve cutting survey lines. And immediately we called the Forestry Department. But our crew had an encounter with them, and they're saying that they have met."
"And I have a recording and I will send it to you because they specifically said Minister Cordell Hyde. We met with him in 2022, January of 2022 and he has given us permission. They call themselves Green Hill Farming cooperatives, something to that effect. Well, I got a call this morning that they're in there again, and word is that Minister Mike Espat has told them to go in and cut and that he will see to it that it gets dereserved."
"When are we going to learn to preserve what we have? What we have is long term sustainable license. Give you an example of the 680 something mahogany trees for this harvest plant. We're only cutting about 60 10%. The rest, we're not going to come back for another 30 years to look at. So you see how sustainable it is."
"But further to that, our company already paid Springfield Nursery for 4000 assorted forest trees and we ourselves harvested seeds, mahogany and cedar and other prickly yellow and others from the reserve. And we have a nursery right now and I'm going to invite the meadow to see this because I know that this is going to blow up and this tells me that elections is coming."
"When you tell a whole group of man, go man go cut it and I will get it to dereserved. And we're hearing that from more than one person."
We reached out to the Minister of Natural Resources Cordel Hyde stated who told us that he would not - and cannot - give permission to log in a reserve since forestry and reserves such as the Maya Mountains are not his domain.
We also reached out to the Chief Forest Officer, Wilbur Sabido, who said, quote, "We have been following that report that we received from Mr Lopez., we had encountered people in the past in the Reserve doing illegal logging or hunting. We haven't authorized any surveys in the Reserve nor do I think that we will, and no one has approached us about doing any surveys. We are doing our own assessment and investigation to get some clarity about this situation." End quote.
We will keep following this story.
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