Big fish farm opens in Democracia

With the value of Belize’s farm grown shrimp exports climbing steadily, the realm of aquaculture is no longer a novelty. Today, a significant new investment was officially opened in the field of fish farming. The operation is located on the Coastal Road near the village of La Democracia.

Janelle Chanona, Reporting

Tilapia: the very name might leave a fishy taste in the mouths of most Belizeans…but according to local experts, the specimens are dollar bills with fins.

Emile Mena, Fresh Catch Belize Limited

“Tilapia is a fish that’s easy to grow, it’s a hardy fish, very very few things can kill a tilapia. Tilapia grows in eight months to ten months depending on the temperature. We of course in Belize, and in Central America, have the perfect environment to raise tilapia.”

Janelle Chanona

“According to the Government of Belize, last year the aquaculture industry produced some fifty million dollars in foreign exchange, which might explain the boom in shrimp farming and tilapia production.”

Emile Mena

“One of the first things we had to do was convince ourselves that we knew nothing about tilapia…about fish.”

And one of the first people to dive in head first into tilapia farming is Emile Mena of the Mena Group of Companies. Their latest investment, Fresh Catch Belize Limited, includes thirty-six, one acre ponds and two, twenty acre reservoirs…ready and waiting for two hundred and fifty thousand red and grey tilapia.

Emile Mena

“They came about this size…point five grams, I can’t convert that. And right now they weigh about forty-five grams, so they grew forty-four point five grams in two months, so they really grow fast.”

Engineered by Israeli experts, Mena says Fresh Catch is designed to be a money maker.

Emile Mena

“I am a hundred percent confident of that. We have our markets already secured. We have letters of intent to purchase already. The market is growing about thirty percent per year, that is the U.S. market, which is a huge market. And we are looking at a niche market, we are not trying to compete the Asian companies that are exporting frozen fillets to the U.S. We are close enough to the U.S. to where we can export, on a daily basis, fresh Tilapia.”

The Menas estimate in the first phase of their project, they’ll be exporting three thousand pounds of fillet every day to markets in the United States and possibly Mexico…and at a minimum price of three U.S. dollars a pound, well, you do the math.

Thanks to financing from the Inter-American Investment Corporation, the Latin American Agri-Business Development Company, the Development Finance Corporation and the Mena family, millions of dollars have been pumped into this enterprise. But not everybody can get their hands on that kind of money, so the Government of Belize is promoting satellite farming to local business people.

Beverly Wade, Fisheries Administrator

“And what this project has proposed to do is that they intend that they would develop the capacity to provide fingerlings to small farmers and also develop the capacity to process whatever is being produced by small farmers, so there will be like a central point for small farmers to now farm tilapia and in the future, to have somewhere to sell their tilapia.”

It is believed that in the first phase of the Fresh Catch project, eighty jobs will be created. By the end of the third phase, two hundred people will be working with the company.