Email

Print

Belize Rural North Area Representative Edmund Castro says he’s determined to make his division the tilapia capital with residents using small scale fish farming for subsistence and revenue generation. And now he’s making a sure step towards that with the establishment of a co-op for fish farmers along the Old Northern Highway. The initial meeting was held yesterday in Maskall at the Community Center where interested villagers got the learn about the nuts and bolts of a community cooperative form the experts. George Myvett from Fisheries was one of them.

George Myvett, Fisheries Department
“We are involved in a project today with the Hon. Mr. Castro in which he is promoting small scale fish farming for the rural communities. It has to be a team approach. Minster Castro is providing the inspiration and political leadership and the Fisheries Department and some of the other government of Belize agencies are providing the technical support.”

Hugo Miranda, Department of Cooperatives,
“It so happens that the Minister of the State in the Ministry of Works is very much interested in organizing a cooperative in this area and we are here to provide all the services that he requires in that regard from organizing the group, having a management structure, regulating them, and basically supervising their accounting from here onwards.”

George Myvett,
“More or less for every one pound of protein that is taken in to the human body in Belize, a pound of it is fish protein. You know what our population is so it is a matter of doing the arithmetic. Generally speaking the opportunities are two fold. For a small scale fish farming we foresee that this product should be at the market, it should be in major supermarkets, as well as smaller retail outlets. This is where the opportunities for small scale fish farmers lie. The demand is ahead of the supply so this is the time to really get into fish farming.”

Area Resident,
“A lot of single people are at Maskall and this would be good for some of them, especially the single mothers.”

$100,000 was approved in the budget for community tilapia production. With this money, residents are getting ponds excavated at a subsidised rate of $75 an hour for the heavy equipment, it usually costs more than two times that. Work has started on a pond measuring 50 by 200 in Sandhill and that should be able to hold 10,000 tilapia.