Rumble at the B.S.C.F.A.

On Wednesday’s newscast, we showed you the Prime Minister’s take on a situation which is bubbling in the B.S.C.F.A., the much embattled cane farmers association. To break it down, a splinter group in the B.S.C.F.A., led by Alfredo Ortega, went into the Companies Registry and registered the B.S.C.F.A. as a company. They did it without the knowledge or consent of the current Committee of Management of the B.S.C.F.A., and it has created no end of ill feelings, uncertainty and confusion. All stakeholders are still trying to figure out how it happened and what exactly it means, but Ortega maintains that they did it for the sake of the Association and it is a good thing.

Alfredo Ortega

Alfredo Ortega, Director, Orange Walk Branch, B.S.C.F.A.

“When you go and you see the new Act, the new Act doesn’t have any protection for the B.S.C.F.A. as there was before. When the old Act, the 2001 Act was alive, it clearly within it had incorporated the Association with all the terms and conditions and regulations that the Association needed to work with, so that gave the legal authority to the Belize Sugar Cane Farmers Association within the Sugar Industry Act. But when it changed within this new Act that opened for new associations to come on Board, it only opened that any Association can be registered under the Sugar Industry Control Board and that demonstrates that there is an association that has the power to deliver cane within the sugar industry. But what I want to be very clear about is that not only the B.S.C.F.A. had to register itself…because even Producers and Progressive had to go through the same registration under the Companies Act, and that is why we saw it necessary really to protect the assets and the benefit to the cane-farmers or the farmers that remained within the Belize Sugar Cane Farmers Association. That is why we made this move to register the Association so that we can protect all the assets, because there is word out there that there are certain ministers going around trying to persuade many members of the Association to move away from the Association, and once they can kill the Association then they can go ahead and sell all the assets of the B.S.C.F.A., and based on those moves we came on board and said that we cannot stand here and see that our Association where we have worked for many years come to an end and come to a fall without doing anything. And that is why we came and registered the Association but it is not the people that signed becoming owners of the Association. It remains the B.S.C.F.A.”