Sugar Scarcity Spreads; What’s G.O.B.’s Intervention?

If you’ve been going to major supermarkets in several municipalities, including Belize City, you would find that there is no sugar on the shelves. As early as the beginning of October, residents had been complaining of a sugar scarcity, despite the millers saying that there is no shortage of plantation white sugar.  It is because large volumes of sugar are being sold to Mexico and Guatemala at a huge profit. News Five asked Prime Minister Briceño about how this issue is being dealt with.

Prime Minister John Briceño

Prime Minister John Briceño

“Unfortunately, what is happening is that in Belize, we heavily subsidize the cost of sugar for our citizens and rightly so. But whilst it is being sold here at a very cheap price, when you go to Mexico and Guatemala, it is being sold as much as twice or three times the price. Our wholesalers – some of them, not all of them – unscrupulously get that sugar and they sell it to people from the other country. What they do with the sugar, obviously, they don’t use illegal means to get it across into their country and they make a killing at the head or on the backs of our sugar cane farmers. So we need to find a way how we could close that gap and then also find a way how our sugar cane farmers can benefit from those higher prices.”