Educators launch honey project in Toledo
Few Belizean products have been able to successfully break into international markets, but one group of Toledo educators is hoping that traditional practices and modern day marketing will spell success in the honey industry. News Five’s Kendra Griffith reports.
Kendra Griffith, Reporting
Having convinced the bees that their plan for harvesting and marketing honey was for a good cause, it is now left to the management and students of the Tumul K?in Learning Centre to get the public to feel the same way.
At the project?s launch this week at the Radisson, the centre?s managing director, Dr. Filiberto Penadas, told News Five the initiative was borne out of necessity.
Dr. Filiberto Penadas, Tumul K?in Learning Centre Managing Director
?We needed to combine a number of things: generate income, promote sustainable development, and create an outside classroom where students can learn about production, marketing and so on. So I think we combined all of those together and we saw that honey was obviously one with great potential. It was relatively easy to do, both the Ministry of Agriculture, Taiwanese mission, marketing board and so on are talking about honey being a product with high potential, so we thought, hey why don?t we go there.?
Armed with seventy thousand dollars in funding from PACT and the Global Environmental Facility?s Small Grants Scheme, the centre hopes to one day make enough profit off its home-grown industry to become self-sustainable.
Dr. Filiberto Penados
?You need money to make money, really. Thanks to G.E.F. we have some money to do that. We have honey, we expect it to make a significant contribution, and probably not in this first year, but definitely in the next year I think we will have a significant contribution. We have cacao, we produce cacao, we sell cacao. We are exploring also possibilities of maybe producing an organic chocolate. We produce juices that we sell in local P.G. market, jams, peppers, and so on.?
Located in the Toledo District, the Tumul K?in Learning Centre operates a five year programme geared towards underprivileged youths. It offers secondary education training in areas such as agro-processing, eco-cultural tourism, and sustainable management … with emphasis on traditional Mayan practices.
Dr. Filiberto Penados
?By bringing students to Tumul K?in, teaching them that their own cultural knowledge, their own values and so on are valid, we built their self-confidence. We also prepare the stage for them to make use of those cultural and natural resource that they have, combined with contemporary knowledge and so on. So ours is a long-term strategy. We work specifically with the students in the first instance, but as students come in then we also start working with the parents because we have instances for example, where because their child has been trained to do honey production they want to start it at home, or we are teaching them how to do sheep production and they want to start it at home.?
At the launch, Prime Minister Said Musa told the gathering that his vision is for Tumul K?in honey to enjoy sweet success both at home and abroad.
Prime Minister Said Musa
?Students of Tumul K?in I know this is a proud day for all of you to be showing off your work, because this is your work, not just some big industry. You all are proving that it can be done on a small scale with a little bit of funding. But through hard work and through dedication we have this product to launch on the Belize market and hopefully one day on the international market. We want to find Tumul K?in honey in Taiwan, in Japan, in England, in the United States, all over. South America, but it will mean that what you are starting today can become a great product for tomorrow for Belize as a whole.?
The Toledo honey is expected to hit supermarket shelves countrywide in the next week.
Kendra Griffith, reporting for News Five.
The Tumul K’in Learning Centre currently has forty students enrolled in its education programme.
