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And one sector of the economy that’s rearing to go is cattle export - but the western border backdoor has been effectively blocked by a village leader.  

So, we also asked Minister Panton about the Government’s plan to address the sudden halting of the cattle exportation between Belizean livestock producers and their Guatemalan customers. An informal trade route was established many years ago with the Cayo village of Bullet Tree as the transit point. But, for several weeks now, the Chairman of the Village Council has been preventing this trade, which generates over 40 million dollars annually in revenue.

He was attempting to enforce his own collection of fees to allow the livestock producers to move their cattle through the village. The bottleneck has since made the news, and so, we asked Panton about this dispute and the subsequent loss of earnings, and the damage to an already sputtering economy. Here’s what she had to say:

Hon. Tracy Taegar Panton - Minister of State, Investment, Trade And Commerce
"There’s no sanctioning of any kind of illegal trade. I think the position of the Government has always been to try and ensure that we can have a formal system for trading, whether it’s cattle or poultry, with our neighbouring countries. I know the Ministry of Agriculture has been busy, and our embassy in Guatemala has been very busy trying to find a formal channel for this trade to happen because there are risks. There is certainly a great risk for the informal system. And we want to make sure that we capture as much as we can in the formal system so that we can account for what’s going across the border both ways. And so, we’re still on a discussion with the Guatemalan authorities. I’m not sure about the dynamics in Bullet Tree. I’m certainly far removed from that, but my office, the Director of Trade, has been speaking to his counterparts as well, to see how we can find a formal system for the trade of cattle and other goods and services."