Belize’s Port Sector Faces Challenges Despite Potential, Study Shows

The Belize Port Authority says the country’s ports are in dire need of infrastructural and logistics improvements to increase the sector’s contribution to the economy. Last year, the BPA embarked on a project to conduct an economic and social impact study to determine how activity at the ports affects various sectors of the economy. A consulting firm from Spain, Maritime and Logistics was awarded the contract and recently completed the study. Over the past two days, the company has presented the findings to the BPA’s management and other stakeholders to paint a picture of the port sector. In a nutshell, the study shows that Belize has major potential, but its port sector suffers from low productivity, bad infrastructure, and other issues. We spoke to Acting Ports Commissioner Kaylon Young about the findings and how the data will be utilized. 

Kaylon Young, Ports Commissioner: “For one Belize does, the port does have a great impact on our economy first and foremost. But we can do better, there is room for improvement in terms of infrastructure at the ports, in terms of digitization, in terms of efficiency. So how we could increase the efficiency of the ports, increase the infrastructure of the ports to have a greater impact on our economy and the social well-being of Belizeans. It’s saying that if we don’t do anything then we can’t expect to improve and as technology advances, as the ships get bigger, as ports become more digitalized, as we’re looking at things like decarbonization if we don’t do anything we’ll be left behind and so we have maybe a negative impact or a lower impact than we do right now to our economy. So if you want to keep up with the times, keep up with the changing infrastructure, keep up with the happenings in the maritime sector we have to do some improvements, improve efficiency, improve in digitalization and see how we can ensure that as time changes we’re keeping up and we’re assisting in doing our part in building our economy and helping the communities. Now we’ll look at the reports and go forward look at policies to put in place in incorporating stakeholders in what policies we want to put in place, where we want to go from here, set a strategic direction, settings steps to how we get there. So the information will provide guidance for us and the stakeholders as how we move forward where we go from here as it relates to developing our port sand ensuring the our port is vital in our economy and that our people are not disadvantaged because of failure to comply with what we need to comply with.”

President of the consulting group Edwardo Lugo spoke about key findings of the study and factors that were taken into consideration when producing recommendations. 

Edwardo Lugo, President, Marine & Logistics Consulting Group: “It was a long process because we had to first obtain data. We did meetings with stakeholders. In addition to that we also went and visited the ports themselves so we started in July 2023 developed the study and the last report was submitted in January 2024. We went and visited the port, we had a meeting with them and the second deliverable was the economic and social impact assessment where the idea there was to measure the impact in terms of revenue generation, in terms of employment generation, in terms of the impact of the port sector on the Belizean GDP and the third deliverable was evaluating the BPA, the Belize Port Authority. We did a diagnosis of how the Belize Port Authority is acting right now. We met with them and the position of the people working in the Belize Port Authority and the output of that study was what needs to be done to capture more value of the ports sector in Belize.”

Notably, the study theorizes that if major upgrades aren’t made in the sector, its contribution to GDP is expected to remain at 1 percent over the next ten years.