The membership of the Belize Sugar Cane Farmers Association is scheduled to convene a special meeting on Sunday in Orange Walk where a vote on the start of the crop season will be taken. Once the result of the exercise is favorable work can get underway at Tower Hill by next week. That, however, depends on an agreement that has been struck between the committee of management of B.S.C.F.A. and Belize Sugar Industries Limited. If the agreement is rejected, both parties will return to their point of departure and negotiations will once again commence from scratch. It is indeed a lengthy process, one that is being encumbered by the prospect of an injunction. This afternoon, we spoke by phone with B.S.I.’s Chief Financial Officer Belizario Carballo who says that the application for judicial review is being influenced by persons who have been absent from the negotiating table.
Belizario Carballo
Via Phone: Belizario Carballo, Chief Financial Officer, B.S.I.
“Essentially the B.S.C.F.A. has decided to take the agreement that currently has been finalized and take it to their membership for what we would consider to be re-ratification and for them to be able to proceed to sign. What is important to note is that we currently have an agreement with the B.S.C.F.A., so the process of negotiating an agreement was concluded this week and we were hoping that we could have signed that agreement either Monday or Tuesday on the basis that the last two proposals that the B.S.C.F.A. came back to us on last week Wednesday, we responded to those two fully accepting them. We responded to the B.S.C.F.A. on Monday, Monday of this week and so we felt that that then cleared the way for the agreement to then be signed and so we were expecting a signature of the agreement on Monday or Tuesday of this week and that would have then led to an agreement between the parties of a start of crop date which we were expecting to have occurred either Friday or Saturday of this week. So that is the plan that we had for this week and that was how things were developing but unfortunately the process has been stalled by this request and in fact there was, as you know, an application; it’s not yet an injunction, it’s just an application. But there is a process that has been set afoot to seek to stall the process which is, in our view, unfortunate because it is being led clearly by individuals who have not been part of the process.”
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