🗞️ EDITORIAL:

By: Omar Silva I Editor/Publisher

National Perspective Belize I Digital 2025

www.nationalperspectivebz.com

Belize City: Thursday 3rd July 2025

When the last cane truck rolls away and the last mill closes, there will be plenty of blame to go around. But before the politicians, the corporate lawyers, and the association bosses start pointing fingers at each other, let’s be clear: this was the inevitable harvest of arrogance, greed, and cowardice.

Prime Minister John Briceño has presided over this collapse with the same brand of empty slogans and dithering that has become his government’s signature. He swept into power promising a renaissance in the North—modernization, fairness, opportunity. What did farmers get? A revolving door of sugar czars, an absentee Minister of State, and a Prime Minister too timid to confront ASR/BSI.

For five years, Briceño and his Cabinet refused to legislate a sustainable pricing mechanism, refused to create real pest control programs, and refused to stand up to a foreign company that now sues Belizeans in their own courts while enjoying every concession the state can provide. When four farmer associations finally mustered the courage to unite, what did the government do? Offer limp words of concern and moral lectures about rum.

This is leadership by press release—nothing more.

ASR/BSI: The Greedy Guest That Ate the Host

And then there is ASR/BSI, the transnational predator that arrived promising “investment” but quickly showed its true ambition: to squeeze every last dollar of profit out of Belizean soil while exporting the risk and the cost.

How else do you explain:

• A lawsuit against cane farmers, knowing the government will likely bail them out with taxpayers’ money?
• A pricing regime so distorted that farmers sell sugar below production cost while ASR counts its earnings?
• An utter disregard for partnership, solidarity, or shared sacrifice?

This is not corporate stewardship—it is plantation economics in modern clothing, the colonization of Belize’s economy by a foreign interest that sees cane farmers as disposable.

Farmers: No More Waiting to Be Saved

But let us be brutally honest: the farmers themselves bear their share of this disaster.

For decades, the sugar cane industry has been fractured by egos, petty rivalries, and a fatal unwillingness to speak with one voice. Every year, we hear about unity talks—only to watch them collapse under the weight of distrust and personal ambition.

• Where was that unity when ASR negotiated the first contracts?
• Where was that unity when prices began to slip below production costs?
• Where was that unity when the infestation of Fusarium started to spread like wildfire?

The truth is this: no government, no company, and no NGO will save an industry whose own producers cannot put aside their differences. The sugar belt has waited too long for someone else to lead. And now, everyone is paying the price.

A Rotten Harvest of Inaction

Today, Belize faces the collapse of a century-old industry—an industry that built towns, paid for educations, and anchored the North in dignity and purpose. And it is dying because:

• Politicians lacked the courage to act.
• Corporations lacked the decency to share.
• Farmers lacked the discipline to unite.

The Time for Blame Is Over

This editorial is not written to make friends. It is written to state a simple, painful truth:

Everyone failed.

And no amount of spin, no carefully worded statement, no photo op with cane trucks behind you will change that.

If this industry is to have any chance of surviving, it will not come from the same tired circle of excuses and half-measures. It will come from a final, collective awakening—a decision to:

• End the government’s role as a cowardly bystander.
• End ASR/BSI’s predatory monopoly.
• End the chronic disunity of farmers.

Anything less is just another lie.