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And it is all because of that cheap European beat sugar that's flooding the market. Today we asked Agriculture Minister Godwin Hulse, how Belize will recover. Well, he says he had anticipated this price drop, But he is optimistic that ASR/BSI will find a way to work around it.

Hon. Godwin Hulse, Minister of Agriculture
"Well we knew for some time, in fact we knew long ago as early as 2001 that by 2017-2018 there would be a reduction on the price because the preferential market has faded. It is one of the reasons why we continue to push and upgrade in the industry particularly at the production level in simple terms if you can increase your yields on the same piece of land with basically the same inputs then a reduction in price can be mitigated by an increased yield."

"But more fundamentally right now ASR/BSI is looking at what we call direct consumption sugars and we are trying to get back into the Caribbean market where we rightly belong, with sugar that goes right on your table so it needs no further processing, raw sugar is waning and sending sugar to Tate and Lyle to be refined is not the way to go so we are pushing this process through COTED to get our sugar into the Caribbean as you know CARICOM's whole idea was to be for the lay man listening tonight, a big Belize so you can sell from Corozal to PG, you should be able to sell from here to all the other islands, it should not be a problem but of course as I have said we Caribbean people we are brothers and sisters but we can't get along, come visit me but stay in your yard so there is a lot of struggle to get this done but we are making strides and we are sure that with the new investments ASR/BSI are making we will be able to get at least a better price for our sugar than we would get for raw sugar which then facilitates and aids the farmers because it is 65-35 split."