Blue Creek Group Constructs Soybean Plant

And, while the production is in abundance, a group from Blue Creek has taken things one step further and are in the process of construction a soybean plant with assistance from the government.  Minister Mai noted that once the plant is completed it will lend to further development and revenues for the country.

Jose Abelardo Mai, Minister of Agriculture: “The soybean plant is being right now installed at Blue Creek. That plant is supposed to be commissioned any time now. It is a state of the art plant. It is made in India and it is the solvent extraction type which means that it uses chemical extraction to extract all the oil from the soybean. Now soybean has two main products, as a matter of fact at times the product becomes the byproduct and the byproduct becomes the product the oil and the meal. This plant is able to extract as much oil from the grain itself. Now to complement that the group in Spanish Lookout is now investing at this time they are installing a soybean oil refinery because the money at times is in the oil at times it is the soy bean meal. So if the meal is used for animal feed and the oil is used for human consumption but when you have the oil in the raw form you have to sell it as a raw oil and it fetches a very low price so what the farmers did and what the Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Finance allowed the importation of these equipment duty free so that it’s an incentive for investment to occur in the country and as a result of that farmers then realized that we as a government are serious and then they started to plant more soybean. The soybean plant solvent extraction plant is a cooperative in Blue Creek, it’s a cooperative of farmers. The oil refinery is owned by investors in Spanish Lookout, that’s the refinery.”

At the start of 2023, Belize had begun exporting soybean to Trinidad and Tobago, and are currently looking at other countries.  As a point of information, when soybean is processed, the oil is extracted, and what is left from that is then converted to soybean meal, used as animal feed.