BELIZE EXPORT SMUGGLING GROWS due to government difficulties!

ANCEDOTAL STREET REPORTS BY RANCHERS ON MACAL RIVER MARKET GOSSIPING AND COMPLAINING AT THE STATE OF THE CATTLE PRICES AND PROBLEMS, BACKED BY THE EXCELLENT STATISTICAL DATA FROM THE BELIZE AG REPORT OF JUNE/JULY, GIVES ME THE BASIS FOR THE IMPRESSIONS EXPRESSED BY THIS ARTICLE ON MY BLOG! IT IS NOT ONLY CATTLE RANCHERS COMPLAINING, BUT PRODUCERS OF MANY VEGETABLE CROPS AS WELL, WITH ESSENTIALLY THE SAME PROBLEMS WITH THE GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRATIC PROCESSES.
by Ray Auxillou, August, 2010

Recently I wondered about spiritual, and mental tussles facing some of the more religious agriculture farmers. There is a constant complaint from government about farmers smuggling things for export across the borders., in which the government loses control and also revenues.
It is the government itself that is causing most of this situation. At one time a couple of decades ago, the agriculture budget for government was around 25% of government revenues. Today the budget for agriculture support by the government is 1.4% says the article by the editor. At one time in 2006 the budget for agriculture had actually shrunk to 1.1%. While tourism might still be king as a pillar of the economy, and oil is growing to be another pillar on a smaller scale, agriculture is still the mainstay of the economy of Belize.
There is an old saying; “you can’t get blood out of a stone”. The government is faced with some hard choices due to the costs of paying off past government loan borrowing. The available money to pay off loans and interest is getting bigger, year by year, while the revenues have shrunk.
First of all SMUGGLERS in agriculture taking stuff for export across the border DO REALIZE that the government is in dire financial straits. Nor do they look at the UDP government as not doing the best they can under the financial circumstances. It is quite evident that the new policy of dividing up scarce revenues, to be spent evenly by the six districts is working for a sense of NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT. People are VERY satisfied with that. Well perhaps not the 80,000 population of the port town down on the coast, that were once considered by them at least, to BE THE COUNTRY OF BELIZE, as the old capital. Certainly the port town has more than their fair share of elected representatives and we can only hope that selfishness will not stop the Elections and Boundaries Commission from recalculating this unfair playing field in two years from now, for the next election.
The big problem from the viewpoint of agriculture export smugglers is that they are dealing with perishable products. For the most part, when you can harvest and sell a crop of something, you have a limited time frame. This can be measured in hours within one day. The problem at least partially, is the plethora of government sub departments and bureaucracies dealing with exports, like BAHA, MAF and other government bureaucratic entities, designed and installed in recent years to ensure we have international qualified products for export. The whole thing needs restructuring. The government needs; a one stop shopping center for these myriad export controlling agencies. The process has to be consolidated and speeded up. Instead of taking three days, or a couple of weeks, the process has to be refined and retuned, to take about an hour and a half. If you include perishable products, the travel cost and time and labor, there is often no choice for a farmer, but to smuggle his product across the frontier. Running around trying to comply with red tape bureaucracy, to be legal and contribute your two cents to government revenues, is self defeating, if something you are exporting is worth $2000 and the cost of running around and doing all the red tape paper work costs $1500 in time and labor and fuel costs. The difference is in a profit, or a loss.
From the viewpoint of the farmer with a desire to encourage the good work of the current UDP government and pay his tithe in cash contributions, the government has to make it easier and more efficient. People have to eat; perishable agriculture products have to be sold on a schedule set by nature, which can include rain storms, muddy roads, availability of labor at a certain time. The red tape as it currently stands, is both too expensive and time consuming and smuggling is the alternative choice, rather than losing months of work, investment and labor. Just because you the government cannot get the paper work done in one and a half hours, instead of three or four days.
Agriculture is improving, both from the viewpoint of processing VALUE ADDED products, new methods of production, new products and some of the difficult paper processing bureaucracy are also playing a part to export these, with their rules and regulations to satisfy international standards, agreements. Unfortunately, the process of development is FORCING smuggling for export, due to the limitations of government cash strapped abilities.
We have a SOCIALIST country, in which 14,000 people are employed by the government. A good segment of this bureaucracy are inefficient. This needs to be remedied with innovation and new organizational structures. Remember, for the most part, you are not dealing with an automobile for export, or a cargo of lumber, that can wait to be exported, but are dealing with a lot of perishable agriculture products. For some of these export products, the TIME ELEMENT is crucial and the choice of do it legal, or do it illegal is a simple choice, if the legal route is simply pre-ordained not going to work. A smuggler can have all the good will and desire in the world to pay the government it’s piece of the action, or build the nation. Seeing your agriculture product die, or spoil while trying to deal with a slow complicated bureaucracy is certainly not good for the economy, nor the farmer and those who depend on the cash earned from sale of those crops.
We the farmer are with you in your efforts in government, but you better get your organization in better order, if this process is going to work of building a nation. Neither the weather or some crops wait for anybody else’s convenience.