Musa, Fonseca head to Venezuela

It’s been a rumour most of the week but tonight it’s official: the Prime Minister and Minister of Home Affairs Ralph Fonseca are on their way to Venezuela for meetings with that country’s president. According to a release issued by the Press Office today, P.M. Musa and Fonseca will join other CARICOM leaders in Caracas for discussions on advancing the Petro Caribe initiative. The meeting follows a visit in June by PDV Caribe, the Venezuela state company promoting regional cooperation in fuel distribution. While in Belize, the delegates talked about future shipments of refined products as well as the construction of storage tanks to better handle those imports. Belize signed on to Petro Caribe in June 2005. The effort is the brainchild of President Hugo Chavez, whose country is the world’s fifth largest oil exporter, as a means of lowering energy costs by cutting out middle men and lessening the region’s dependence on the United States. In addition to the regional programme, under which a percentage of the purchase price of petroleum products is loaned back at a concessional rate, Venezuela has also provided Belize with a fifty million U.S. dollar loan for financial restructuring as well as a five point six million U.S. dollar grant, with a further ten million in the pipeline.