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But, these structures are important. It keeps pests, bacteria and other agricultural crop- threatening diseases from entering the country. Well, to ensure this practice continues, one of these automatic spraying facilities has been installed at the Port of Belize. It was officially opened today and the Minister of Agriculture elaborated on the importance of this facility.

Hon. Godwin Hulse, Minister of Agriculture
"This is a new spraying station. We have built it in cooperation in OIRSA. If you recall there is one in the North we opened some time ago, there is one at the Benque Border. For some years now we have been trying to manage vehicles coming in particularly to prevent any sort of exotic diseases or any other things that can be transmitted here in the country and so we had a facility here before it was not as elaborate as this one, this is an automatic spraying facility that the vehicle can just move through and everything works and so, just like the others, yes."

"This is all part of the Ministry's program to continuously enhance, secure and protect our agricultural industry because to us at least to me who has been most of my life in agriculture that is where it is critical. It is one of the reasons we continue to say "You don't bring anything to this country that we don't check" and if you do we will confiscate and don't call anybody not even the Prime Minister because he won't help you, the reason is not to be mean, difficult and definitely not to play any politics. It is preserve what we have here in a sense as our agricultural and economic leg and that is what this is about."

There is a structure like this at the Benque Border, and one in Corozal. The facility at Port was the last to be installed. The entire project costs $288,000 US dollars. The International Regional Organization for Health in Agriculture (OIRSA) provided the funds.