E.U. Assistance helps sugar and banana belts

The World Trade Organization may have stripped Belize’s sugar and banana industries of their preferential trade agreements with the European Union, but the E.U. is attempting to compensate with technical assistance to make those industries more competitive on world markets. Today Prime Minister Dean Barrow and E.U. Ambassador Marco Alemanni signed two agreements that will provide approximately seventeen point five million dollars for improvement of infrastructure in the sugar belt and five and a quarter million dollars to improve conditions in banana growing areas. According to Barrow, the funds are just a part of the funding committed through 2010.

Prime Minister Dean Barrow
“The E.U. financing over the next five years or so is just shy of two hundred million dollars. And I think you will all agree that that is extremely significant indeed.”

“The concentration with respect certainly to the sugar belt of the country on infrastructure is a concentration that of course has been worked out between the government of Belize and the European Union, it is certainly a concentration that this new administration roundly endorses.”

The funding for Orange Walk and Corozal will go primarily to improve cane feeder roads, while the assistance in the south will focus on transportation, high school and adult skills training. Belizean bananas no longer enjoy any preferential access to European markets while sugar loses its price and quota supports in November 2009.