The Barrow Administration currently has the Unemployment Relief and the
Food Assistance programs running to aid poor Belizeans who lost their
jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic. They also in the process of
assessing business owners who applied for help under the Micro, Small,
and Medium Enterprises program. And now, they've launched a government
aid program to help the nation's farmers who continue to be devastated
by the pandemic.
It's called the Farmer Assistance program, and with 8 million US
dollars from the World Bank, the government is hoping to help more than
8,700 agricultural households in the country. This money was part of
another loan from the Bank, but it has now been re-allocated to fund
the Farmer Assistance Program.
And to share details on how it will work, Agriculture Minister Godwin
Hulse and his technical team hosted a virtual press conference, which
lasted for 100 minutes. 7News tuned in, and here's what the Minister
had to say about how this program works, and who the beneficiaries are.
Here's what he had to say this morning:
Hon. Godwin Hulse - Ministry of Agriculture
"Our Ministry is very, very pleased to announce that we have finally
concluded the negotiations with the World Bank for 16 million Belize
dollars of loan funds to provide relief to farmers who were impacted and
affected by market contraction caused by COVID-19, those who suffered
losses from the prolonged drought of 2019, and additionally, Ministry will
provide assistance to vegetable farmers to improve the post-harvest
handling of the product, and provide financial support - that is cash
transfer to all female farmers. And I'll say if we had an audience, we
would certainly be clapping for this because there are 2,052 female farmers
who will each - 1, receive $500 in assistance. That is to encourage and
promote women in agriculture. As you know, females in many cases are heads
of households and the backbone of our food and nutrition. We do have a
female farmer of the year, and so, we included - in this relief - every
single female farmer who is registered on our BAIMS list. In addition to
that, we will be providing this cash transfer to 5,372 farmers totally - of
which 2052 are a part. And those are farmers with farms smaller than 20
acres down. That is how we are doing this. It is a cash transfer. You all
will know that BAIMS is one of the programs we are extremely proud of. It's
the Belize Agricultural Information Management System. And this was
launched a couple of years ago in its making, and we perfected over the
year. The reason for that is that we would not have been able to do this
had we not have a register for farmers, pure and simple. This register was
used by the World Bank in meticulous detail to arrive at the disbursements
that we will make. Now in determining the allocation of funds, farmers were
categorized in small, medium, and large. The bulk of the funds are targeted
at small and medium farmers. At this juncture, I need to point out that
there is another World Bank fund of 25 million US dollars - that's 50
million dollars - project, which is providing support primarily to medium
and large commercial farmers, to assist with climate-smart agriculture
adaptation measures, and to respond to climate changes."
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