Minister of Agriculture Hon. Jose Abelardo Mai, Speaker of the House, Hon. Valerie Woods, Special Envoy H.E Rossana Briceño toured the Agro-processing Unit at Central Farm

Women and small farmers are now gaining new entrepreneurship skills as they learn how to add shelf life to their farm produce, to earn more profits by turning their raw farm produce into value-added products, at the Agro-processing unit of the Central Farmer Research Development and Innovation Center.

Special Envoy for Families and Children, Mrs Rossana Briceño witnessed how the center is developing new products for the domestic market with the potential to also develop into exports, when she led the women of the House of Representatives and the Senate on a tour of the facility last Friday morning, November 26.

The center has been teaching other small farmers how to get into the business of making soy sauce and pepper sauce through better packaging, labeling and marketing. Other farmers have been taught how to turn their soursop fruits, which they can’t sell on the local market, into pulp to deliver to larger processors for making soursop juice, explained the Minister of Agriculture and Food Security Hon. Jose Abelardo Mai.

Similarly, the banana farmers stood to take a huge loss from thousands of boxes of bananas which did not meet market standard for export, as foreign buyers are much fickler about the quality and appearance of the fruit they buy. The Center has helped them salvage the food value of their crop, by processing the fruit into dried fruit snacks and into banana flour, to be made into banana bread and a nutritious fruit drink. The ministry’s fundamental philosophy has been to make Belize self-sufficient in food by producing local products to replace import, and Minister Mai said his ministry is confident that their banana flour will meet the nutrition standards to replace the “Incaparena” soy and corn flour mix, which the Ministry of Education has been importing as a food supplement for the schools feeding program. This would be an important step forward for the children and the farmers.

This was Special Envoy Briceño’s interest in her tour of the facility, how these value-added products might help the sustainability of the schools feeding programme. Funding is limited, and so she was investigating how to enlist the support of the Ministries of Health and Wellness and Agriculture to partner with the Education ministry to help feed schoolchildren at least one solid meal per day. She noted that many families have been struggling with unemployment during the pandemic. The parents are eager for their children to return to the classrooms for in person instruction, so that their children might be well fed, through the Education ministry’s “Early Start” schools feeding program. Briceño is also the principal of St Peter’s Anglican School in Orange Walk Town, which has had a feeding program since 1991. She lamented at times seeing her students vomiting from an empty stomach with nothing to throw up, because they had not eaten from the night before. Children cannot learn on an empty stomach, if the system fails them in the kitchen, she cautioned. Her concern was to taste-test the quality of the snacks, the jams, jellies, fruit preserves and food produced to determine if they were something the children would readily eat.

Speaker of the House Hon. Valerie Woods led the members of the Belize Parliamentary Alliance against Hunger and Malnutrition (BPAHM) who accompanied Briceño. She said the bipartisan fight against hunger was begun under the previous administration in April 2016, with the support of the regional “Meso-America Sin Hambre” initiative of the Mexican International Development Cooperation Agency (AMEXCID), which was also funded by the United Nations’ Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO).