Former President of Colombia in Belize for Investment Summit

Ivan Duque Marquez

A News Five Belize Team is in San Pedro to cover the 2023 Belize Investment Summit. A day ahead of the start of the event, we sat down for an exclusive interview with former President of Colombia Ivan Duque Marquez. The former president will be the guest speaker at tomorrow’s opening ceremony. He is known globally for leading numerous conservation initiatives in green and blue spaces within his home country and across Latin America. President Duque also co-authored a book on the orange economy in 2013. Here is what he told us about what can be expected from his address.

Ivan Duque Marquez, Former President of Colombia

“I think Belize is a land of opportunity, of innovation and transformation and I am here to speak about the three colors combined can be able to give Belize the dynamic for the future economic, social and also in investment terms. So we are talking about the orange economy, the innovative economy, and creative economy, the green economy and the blue economy. Green and blue referring all this beautiful land full of diversity but also one of the most important coral reefs around the world and also these atolls that have this amazing linkage with nature. So those colors are combined and Belize gets to provide more incentives to bring the film industry and also to get the cultural economy a big agent of social transformation and you combine it with the blue bond and the green bond, the green finance at the same time you make Belize the land of blue ecotourism in this hemisphere what we will is not only the doubling, but tripling of GDP within the next decade or fifteen year. So we are talking about that potential and that is what I want to share with all the participants but also sharing some of the lessons we have from the orange economy in Colombia from the green taxonomy, from the thirty by thirty initiative that we achieved in 2022 and also the immense potential of protecting the coral reefs as one of the most interesting ways of mobilizing environmental philanthropy around the world to protect this treasure.”