Belize Ascends to Caribbean Agriculture Health and Food Safety Agency

Louis Zabaneh

Turning to Monday’s senate sitting; aside from debate on the new Contractor General and the Caracol road expansion, two resolutions were passed.  The first authorizes the accession by Belize to the Caribbean Agriculture Health and Food Safety Agency. The purpose is to establish an effective regime of sanitary and phytosanitary measures in line with the management and operations of national agriculture health and food safety systems. Through the agency, Belize is expected to receive support for food safety systems. Speaking on the motion was P.U.P. Senator Doctor Louis Zabaneh, who expressed the need for this type of mechanism.

Dr. Louis Zabaneh, P.U.P. Senator

“We’ve heard in many occasions Mr. President we go to the store and you have expired goods on the shelves and if the public is not fully aware or they might be in dire need of food then they might over look these issues of expiration of food. There is also the issue of nutritional content of the food that we sell. We must look at that very closely. We have the ramen noodle situation with many of our people in the lower income brackets. We must be able to do better for our people Mr. President in terms of having import substitutions programs that will promote our own products, our own fresh healthy fruits and vegetables being sold instead of having these products being imported. I would suggest an idea Mr. President, that we create a hotline so that our people can call in when they see these situations arising in different stores because that is where we get caught because you go buy rice and beans and you find weebles in there and that sort of thing. It is common for the people who have to subject themselves to this kind of situation when they go to the store. Maybe a hotline where people can call in anonymously and report that we are having this kind of situation would hopefully improve the health of our people, the quality of food that our people are consuming because in fact what we eat is really what we are.”