Cane Farmers Association botches distribution of fertilizer
The handsome salary and benefits that the former C.E.O. of Belize Sugar Cane Farmers Association received per year was revealed Wednesday as one of the reasons why Carlos Magana’s contract with the association was not renewed. The other reasons were unaccountability and poor management. Documents made available to News Five by the government newspaper implicate Magana in a fertilizer scandal that questions his management. The documents are a report of an audit from the EuropeAid Cooperation Office on the supply of fertilizer from December 2007 to June 2008. In this period, the distribution of the fertilizer was transferred from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries to the Sugar Industry Control Board and the Belize Sugar Cane Farmers Association (B.S.C.F.A.). There is startling information coming from the May 2009 audit including that the distribution of fertilizer had not been conducted in a transparent and fair manner. The audit recommended that over four hundred thousand pounds be reimbursed by the contracting authority; that is the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, for the supply contract of fertilizers with Prosser. It continued to say that there was no relevant information as to who got the fertilizer or the quantities received. The report says that some farmers did not receive what they were entitled to while “Some farmers received much more than they were entitled to, due to their relationships with the directors who had been authorized by the Committee of Management to determine by themselves the number of bags to distribute to farmers”. Wilfredo Magana, Progresso cane famer and longtime critic of the methods of B.S.C.F.A., says that he is not surprised by the findings of the audit.
Wilfredo “Willie” Magana, Rep. United Cane Farmers
“I was not surprised. As a matter of fact Joe, there was a load of fertilizer given to my community—and I can speak about Progresso—for the hurricane. Look the hurricane damaged everybody in my community in Progresso. There was a million dollars given for fertilizer. There was a truckload in my community and the people that had supported the view of the United Cane Farmers, they never got one sack of that fertilizer. So I’ve been exposing this, I’ve been saying it in meetings and they now realize it that what we’ve been saying is rightly so.”
Jose Sanchez
“Do you think Carlos Magana should have been getting over a hundred thousand dollars in salary and benefits?”
Wilfredo “Willie” Magana
“You know Jose, we were before Mister Magana with the United Cane Farmers and we were with mister Magana, and now we are without mister Magana. We have had two years of long patience, but with all the respect for Mister Carlos Magana, the cane farmers do not have the respect but with my respect to him is that, he as Mister Eck had rightly put it, he has not been doing the job for the industry or the cane farmer. And I would want to add on more to the injury of the finances that this man travelled to Brazil, went to England on several occasions. On some of the occasions he even took his family. He went to Costa Rica, Salvador, he went to all these places where they deal with sugar and not one day when he came, we saw the benefit of all these trips that he was making. This thing must stop if we want to carry the industry forward. Apart from that hundred and five thousand that they are claiming that he gets and that now it is in evidence that he gets, all those trips are benefits to him. So at the end of the year, his package deal is close to quarter million dollars in all benefits. So I think they made the right decision but they took too long to make that decision.”
This afternoon Magaña wrote to Erik Ek, Chairman of the Belize Cane Farmers Association maintain that the decision for his termination was politically motivated and that his recommendations to transform the association was not accepted by the committee of management.
