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Last night, we showed you the plight of the grain farmers from Blue Creek Village in Orange Walk. 

The months-long drought that has been most intense the northern districts has decimated their corn crops. They are at risk of over 2 million dollars in revenue lost because the drought has stunted the growth of their corn. 

They can’t get any commercial value out of the crop, and so, most of it was salvaged to provide feed for cattle ranchers. 

Yesterday, they showed us 2 separate fields of corn. One was kept healthy by mechanical irrigation, which they say is expensive and unsustainable. The other waited for the rain which never came, and the crop had to be scrapped.  

So, we wondered will the local farmers be able to adapt to survive weather and climate change? Here’s what they told us about that:

Albert Rempel - Grain Farmer, Blue Creek Village
"We don’t have any irrigation. We have tried to get into it, but it’s very costly to get into. So, on a farm that’s struggling to try and stay above water, it’s almost impossible to get into because you have to invest so much more money, it’s almost impossible for that same farm to pay for that kind of investment. If we at a better place where we didn’t have all the debts to pay already, then it could still pay for itself."

Rodney Dyck - Grain Farmer, Blue Creek
"There’s that one year out of every 4 or 5 years where things go well, and you enjoy it so much that you try. It sounds like I’m a gambler right? [laughs] We try to reduce the risk as much as possible. And so, we try to invest in as much reduction in risk as possible. So, this past year, I sloped my fields. And I figured, we get too much rain back here sometimes, where the road that you see here floods, and that floods the whole field. So, I put the levees around my field, and I sloped the field. So, I figure that’s my insurance. We can’t buy crop insurance like they can in the US, so we do what we can to insure. And then, irrigating, and pivot irrigation, making reservoirs, making wells, that’s all stuff that we can do, but that costs a lot of money. And so, those are things that we’ll have to try for the future, see if we can get the financing to make our own insurance for our crops."

Hon. Jose Mai - Area Rep., Orange Walk South
"Other countries implement crop insurance. Mexico, right over the river from where we were today, they have crop insurance, not for everything. But, they do have crop insurance. I have heard the CEO said it’s too expensive for us, but I don’t know."

This evening, we spoke with Jose Alpuche, the Agricultural Ministry CEO, and he told us that the corn farmers are not the only ones that have been hit hard by the drought. Currently, the Ministry is conducting an exercise to assess the losses within the agricultural sub-sectors.

Alpuche told us that the Agricultural Ministry does not have resources to aid farmers in times like these where disaster recovery is needed. So, they will have to intercede on their behalf to the Ministry of Finance, to what recovery efforts may be available to them. The Ministry will also try to assist farmers to convince their creditors to re-schedule their loans, that they can better manage repayment and recovery during this time of need.

Additionally, there are talks between the Government and the World Bank and other international institutions for the creation of a disaster recovery fund to aid farmers during emergencies such as this one. Unfortunately, these farmers who were affected by this drought will not enjoy the benefit of this initiative, since it is still not finalized.

Also, last year, the Agricultural Ministry started an initiative with the International Fund for Agriculture and Development to 23 communities in the country that is made up of small farmers. The program is called Resilient Rural Belize, and the premise is to implement climate-smart agricultural practices to become more resilient to climate change and to mitigate the damage of natural disasters.