GOB pledges one million to immediate assist fire victims

Tonight, residents across the Toledo District continue to battle the devastating wildfires that have already destroyed scores of crops, wildlife, and properties totaling over one million dollars. The National Emergency Management Organization (NEMO) has declared the district a disaster area and has begun assisting affected residents. But the extent of the damage continues to grow as more fires continue to pop up in rural communities in the south. For weeks, residents have been pooling together resources and taking it upon themselves to protect their communities and fight off the destructive flames. In view of the crisis, Prime Minister John Briceno has confirmed that the government is seeking international assistance in combatting the wildfires and the damages they have been racking up in the past few weeks.  He noted, in an interview outside the House of Representatives, that the infrastructure and farmlands are not the only issues as there are families in the south and the west who are in need of food and other forms of assistance.

Hon. John Briceño, Prime Minister of Belize: “We quickly realized that this was not an ordinary fire like other times so we immediately declared it a national disaster. By doing that we can then access international assistance. We wrote to IDB, we wrote to CABEI and both of them have already responded that they are going to assist us. We’re using funds from the contingency fund in the budget. We have $5 million dollars aside for emergencies and this is an emergency so in Cabinet we agreed that we’re going to be using a million dollars right now and why a million ? Because we know that’s not enough but this is just to get things going on the ground immediately but we know that we have to be looking at food, that many of our farmers up to Tuesday we had I don’t think we had any houses burning down, maybe one or two but we knew that a lot of them their milpas have burnt down, some of them their corn was burnt down. So we are working with Human Development and Agriculture to see what is the best way to be able to do something that’s sustainable and long term. Want to provide them food for right now but at the same time we have to start to look at giving them for instance seeds so that they can replant their crops and that is where the Ministry of Agriculture is working with. And we know that we’ll have to mobilize even more funds but we hope that in a month’s time we have a clear understanding as to how much is going to be needed so that we can then come with a supplementary budget with a budget that is more properly thought out so that we could address all these issues.”