Mexico Removes Tariffs for Coconut Export from Belize

Minister of Agriculture Jose Abelardo Mai and a delegation of officials from his ministry returned to Belize on Wednesday from a visit to Mexico. They attended meetings focused on opening new agriculture export opportunities for Belize. The National Agri-Food Health, Safety and Quality Service, better known as SENASICA, is the Mexican counterpart of the Belize Agricultural Health Authority and the meeting looked at facilitating the smooth export of beef cattle from Belize and to provide full support for resuming shrimp exports from Belize to Mexico. Minister Mai says that there was approval for the exportation of de-husked green coconuts to Mexico.

Jose Abelardo Mai

Jose Abelardo Mai, Minister of Agriculture

“We had already requested from Mexico that we had interests in supplying coconut to their markets. We have companies in Mexico that wants to buy coconuts – green coconuts in different forms: green whole or green peeled or dry coconuts. Mexico’s policy was no to coconuts at all. The bureaucracy in all countries including Belize is sometimes frustrating. We are not moving forward as fast as we wanted to. We showed them where our problems were and why we couldn’t get certain responses. Just before we left, we got a correspondence saying that coconuts are allowed now, but you have to remove the green parts of it. Why? Because they don’t want the coconuts to be used as planting material. So if you remove that, then you can’t use it for planting material. But we are also looking at dry coconuts. Dry coconuts again, if you look at dry coconuts, there are regulations for that. And they don’t want that either. But they left the door open for us to establish new protocols for that, so my team is working on that right away.”