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Jacob Harms, CEO - Indian Creek Co-Op
"From 2012 we had a serious loss on that. We lost about 90% of our corn fields and then in 2013, we did good. We had a yield about 134,000 bags. Then 2014, we lost almost everything. We were expecting about 250,000 bags of corn. We only received 48,000 bags. So we had a huge loss and this year it looks like we will go the same way or even worse."

"We need the corm for food, for our own to make our corn tortillas and for animal feed, both. We must survive. We must go on. We are looking at the corn field to see what is happening here and we see that the drought is affecting us a lot and we don't know what to do anymore because we are just down. We need any support for something."

Well, today the Ministry of Agriculture sent out a trio of technical reports from the Meteorology Department which confirms that there is a , quote, "drought watch" for northern Belize. This map of the Caribbean region shows Belize shaded in yellow which means that is under drought watch - which is only the first stage of concern - lower than a drought warning, or drought emergency. On the current situation, the report concludes, quote, "Because of the…Below Normal rainfall that is prevailing in 2015 Wet season some parts of Belize especially the North of the country is experiencing drought."

And it doesn't look to improve. The Precipitation Outlook for the period AugustSeptember-October 2015 shows that below normal rainfall levels are expected in the north - particularly in northwest Orange Walk and Northern Corozal. And what's the cause of the below average rainfall? It's called an El Niño Southern Oscillation: which weakens the development of rain, thunder and tropical storms.

The report concludes that the seasonal forecast for August/September/October 2015 is for Below Normal rainfall to prevail over Entire Belize, except the South which will have normal rainfall.