SIB on 2022 Fourth Quarter GDP

The Statistical Institute of Belize held its first quarterly press conference for 2023 today. But before we get to the reasons why food items are more expensive, we’ll first look at the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the fourth quarter of 2022. Goods and services produced in the fourth quarter of 2022 totaled $1.34 billion. An increase of $127.48 million, or 10.5%, when compared to the fourth quarter of 2021. According to statistician Christopher Hulse, the preliminary GDP for the year 2022 shows a 12.1% growth or an increase of $556.15 million compared to 2021. Goods and services produced for the year totaled approximately $5.14 billion. Hulse says that the primary sector decreased while the secondary and tertiary sectors increased. 

Christopher Hulse, Statistician II: “Within the primary sector we observed a $10 million decrease or 6.2% from $162.8 million dollars in 2021 to $152.8 million dollars in 2022 and we observed a decrease in both agriculture, forestry and fishing at 4.3% decrease and mining at 24.3% decrease. So the agriculture industry was affected in that quarter by the hurricane. So moving into details we’ll see how the crops were affected. So the first one, sugar cane. Even though we had rains affecting the quarter or the entire year because there was no harvest in 2021 and we had an early start in 2022 we will have values. So zero for 2021 but because we had an early start to harvest we have nineteen point three metric tons for sugar cane. Moving on to bananas. The excessive rains brought high disease pressure but we also had high production costs and labour shortage so combined we saw a 32.3% decrease in banana from twenty five point three thousand metric tons to seventeen point one thousand metric tons. Moving on to citrus compared to 2021 we observed a 37.4 % decrease from five point four thousand metric tons to three point three thousand metric tons. This loss is attributed to a decrease in acreage as well as the new crops that are supposed to combat citrus greening they’re not coming online as yet, this will be in a couple years.”