“The facts are that the main industries are going through a very challenging time. When you look at citrus, which for 2008 I believe will be down somewhere around thirty percent, when you look at the chaos in the Sugar Industry, which already had down crop in 2008. The forecast for 2009 where the bulk of that thirty-six percent reduction in price from EU, twenty-one percent will be suffered in this 2009 crop. And, of course, we had the strike recently so sugar will be substantially down. The banana, which enjoys a preferential market in Europe, is going through serious travails. In fact, it costs thirty percent more to produce a banana right now than the growers are getting for the banana. I think we’re all concerned, I certainly am as a former tourism minister, about the precipitous fall in overnight tourism. I was in San Pedro on Friday and Saturday and speaking with hoteliers, with tour guides, dive operators, taxi drivers, they all say that tourism is down and down by a much greater percentage than the eight percent that the government has acknowledged the decline is.”

“The Belizean people remember that the government promised they would take down the cost of living famously “No matta what”. The fact is that last year the overall inflation rate was six point four percent. But in food and beverage it was sixteen point five percent. The cost of flour jumped by fifty percent so when you go to the store, instead of getting a dollar of flour, you get fifty cents of flour. The cost of chicken has gone up, I believe by sixteen percent, the cost of rice by thirty-five percent. So instead of getting a dollar of rice, you’re getting sixty-five cents worth of rice. Those are things taking Belizeans into poverty, not taking them out of poverty.”

“Here we are now with the prime minister, a few weeks before he presents his budget, admitting that there will be a shortfall of thirty-one million from the petroleum sector alone and an over expenditure of twenty-seven million. Those are facts; those are not things that we can twist or disguise in anyway. The fact is that oil producing countries, Trinidad and Tobago for example, Venezuela, even Iraq, all of those countries when they formulated their budget they did not set their budget based on the premise that the price of oil would be at a hundred and thirty dollars as we did. We set up ourselves for a disappointment of tens of millions of dollars. In Trinidad the government set their budget based on the price per barrel of oil at seventy dollars. How is it possible? How could the minister of Finance set our budget at a price of one hundred and thirty dollars? This is the mother of all errors because it literally means we over budgeted by tens of millions and that we are losing tens of millions if we did not set the threshold at ninety but perhaps at forty-five or fifty. We are letting that revenue escape the national purse. So I think those are the deficit. The issue of the oil revenues are very, very clear issues of where we believe that the government had been more prudent, both in terms of its projections as in terms of collecting revenues, then I think the picture will be different today. In terms of what will happen when the prime minister announces his budget, he left some aura of mystery surrounding what he is going to do. Well, he’s sure he will come up with a solution. There’s no magic to the solution. What will happen is that projects that were supposed to be completed, projects included in the capital two, so called capital two and capital three, will not be completed and so the delays, the slow implementation of those projects will mean that the deficit will not be as high as it would have been if what was promised in the budget had been spent. So I think that is the formula he will come with that at the end of this month when he presents his budget.”