BELIZE HAMMOCK INDUSTRY KILLED BY CUSTOMS DUTIES AT BORDER.

BORDER DUTIES KILL COTTAGE INDUSTRY EMPLOYMENT BUINESS FOR VILLAGE POOR PEOPLE IN BELIZE

We´ve been working on establishing a hammock making cottage industry business in Western Belize as a development project to provide income to poor families. To generate capital for ladies living at home. All they need is their labor and a couple of cheap things that are easily made, to start making GOOD HAMMOCKS. I´m still waiting for our first sample shipment of nylon colored line spools to come from China. I was talking to a Yucatec lady with a stall at the Macal River market and she was showing me her nylon Yucatec made hammocks she imports for sale here. The hammocks from Guatemala are made of cheaper more available materials and break up quickly. The Mexican Yucatec hammocks are finer made and of superior quality. Most are made by prisoners in jail in Mexico to buy their jail food. Or by ladies in surrounding rural villages, between chores of looking after the family, for extra cash.
At any rate according to the Yucatec lady at the market, when I asked her to bring me colored nylon spools, which she said are produced in factories in Mexico, so we could start a hammock making cottage industry in Belize to provide money for rural poor people, like they have in the Yucatan. She explained that it was cheaper to import the finished Mexican Yucatec hammocks ready made ( thus giving labor to Mexicans instead of Belizeans ) than import the nylon colored twine made in Mexico. The Belize customs duties she explained made this that way.
It sounds like one of those TRANSORMATION DEVELOPMENT RULES, OR LAWS, OR POLICY THINGS only a government can do to encourage light manufacturing in Belize? So far our GOVERNMENT are playing dumb about it.