October 1st marks the opening of the conch season 2019-2020. As such, the Fisheries Department reminds the public of the following regulations:

1. Shell length should exceed 7 inches;
2. Market clean and fillet weight should exceed 3 and 2.75 ounces respectively;
3. No person or establishment shall buy, sell or have in possession diced conch meat other than market clean conch.

The department urges Belizeans to report any illegal activities at 501- 224-4552, Crime Stoppers at 0-800-922-TIPS(8477) or via email [email protected].

The Garifuna Collective is based in Belize and made up of more than 50 musicians of varied generations who strive to express and keep alive the unique music and culture of the Garifuna people.

The Garifuna Collective was featured on Andy Palacios’ album “Wátina” which was awarded the Womex and BBC World Music Award and voted by Amazon as the number one World Music Album of All Time. The Collective just released their newest album, “ABAN,” Sunday (Sept. 15).

Roots and Wires Presents brings the touring arm of the Garifuna Collective to Taos for a show today (Sept. 19) at the Taos Mesa Brewing Mothership, 20 ABC Mesa Road, off U.S. 64 west. The show starts at 8:30 p.m. with doors opening at 8 p.m.

Rooted in resilience and a bit of mystery, the Garifuna people are a mixture of Africans and the original Arawak people of the Caribbean who intermarried four centuries ago. A number of theories exist about their origins and early history.

The music group formed in 2006 and has since traveled to more than 30 countries and five continents sharing their music.

I caught up with Al Ovando via email to learn more about the Garifuna Collective and what they will be bringing to Taos. Ovando has been a part of the collective since its founding. This is an edited version of our interview.

What are the roles you have with the Garifuna Collective?

My roles include being a musician (guitars and bass), a recording engineer, a mixing engineer and a co-producer in the studio and on the road a tour manager, sound engineer, and rhythm guitarist.

Can you tell me a little bit about the Garifuna people and culture?

The Garifuna people have a long history of resilience and survival. The Garifuna ancestors were brought from the West Coast of Africa to the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean and intermarried with the native Arawak Indians. They settled on the island of St. Vincent and were eventually exiled and banished from the island by the French and English colonizers. They had a courageous leader called Joseph Chatuye who led them out of harm’s way and they eventually settled on the coast of Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize. With this movement of people, they brought their own unique language, music, art, food, beliefs, tradition and culture. The Garifuna people live in small, closely bonded villages and towns. They celebrate together in festive times, sad times and in religious ceremonies. This unique way of life is fully accompanied by music. The voices and melodies of men and women can be heard chanting with the deep sounding drums called the Segunda and primero at every opportune time.

What makes Garifuna music unique?

The music is passed down through generations. Each person (composer, singer, instrument player, engineer) is free to play their own original style which comes from the heart of each musician paying homage to their past and keeping it relevant for the future.

What was the vision for the Garifuna Collective – and how has it evolved?

The vision is to create an avenue to keep the tradition and culture alive through documentation and sharing our legacy with the world stage. It has evolved into a group of musicians who understand clearly their role in making the vision a success and in creating a path for future generations to continue the Garifuna story.

How many are in the band?

The Garifuna Collective consists of over 50 musicians and music contributors who have been a part of the project. The touring party is usually eight to nine musicians and this is based on the financial budget before the tour starts.

Can you tell me about your new album, “ABAN?”

The album “ABAN” is the Garifuna Collective venturing into the unknown and experimenting with music and rhythms but keeping true to the soulfulness and unique Garifuna vocal melodies.

What does ABAN mean?

Aban means “one” in English.

Are all of the songs original songs?

All music arrangements are original. All vocals are original except for two songs which are traditional concepts.

Who writes the lyrics for the songs?

Horace Flores, Marcela Aranda, Rolando Sosa, Sheldon Petillo, and Emilio Thomas wrote lyrics on the album “ABAN.”

Who does the musical arrangements?

Ivan Duran, Al Ovando, and Eli Levinson wrote the musical arrangements for “ABAN.”

How did you choose the songs for “ABAN”? Is there an overall theme for the album?

We were experimenting with guitar rhythms and grooves I played. Eli heard them and immediately started to make some drum loops to match. We eventually ended up with melodies that were highly percussive-based and presented it to Ivan in Stonetree Studio. He decided to make use of the work and started working with the vocalist to create melodies over the loops. “Hamala” was created by Emilio Thomas who eventually brought the recorded idea to me and then I took it to the Stonetree Studio where we had fun adding and taking out parts and making the arrangement.

What can people expect from your show here in Taos?

We will take the audience through a historical musical journey as we pay tribute to our friends and ancestors through music. We will play a couple of tracks from the new album “ABAN.”

Anything else you would like us to know?

We are excited to be given a space to share our culture and Belize through music.

By Ariana Kramer
[email protected]

Source: Taos News

Starting December 13, Air Canada will be increasing the number of direct seasonal flights to Belize.

Air Canada announced this week that there will be flights on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays during the season, which lasts from December to April.

Air Canada began offering direct flights from Toronto in 2017, as a part of an expansion in its number of routes. The Belize Tourism Board celebrated the launch of the flights because Belize has been actively trying to increase the number of tourists coming from Canada to Belize. Canada currently is the third-largest visitor destination, accounting for around 7 percent of tourists to Belize.

Over the past few years, the BTB and its partners have been scaling up marketing campaigns in Canada with the hopes of attracting more Canadian tourists. During the push to increase Canadian market share, WestJet also began offering flights from Canada to Belize.

Source: Breaking Belize News

The Omar S. Ortiz Scholarship Foundation was founded on June 8, 2018 with the mission of providing annual scholarships that would help empower a new generation of diverse leaders while keeping the vision of the foundation’s namesake alive. This Scholarship Foundation was designed to allow awardees to fully focus on school rather than having to seek out employment to cover education costs.

The Foundation annually honors deserving students with scholarships that include financial support, academic advising, tutoring, and mentorship to ensure that the recipients have the resources necessary to succeed. The foundation will provide a minimum of one scholarship per year for students transferring into Galen University upon acceptance into an Associate Degree program. Scholarships will be awarded for areas of study focusing on Education, Accounting, or Entrepreneurship – which were 3 things Omar was very passionate about.

Since Omar was a past member of the Galen University Board, the University decided to partner with the Foundation by providing the first two scholarships for the year 2018-2019. The continued success of the Foundation can only be attributed to the selfless support of Omar’s close friends and generous sponsors from within the private sector.

An annual bike ride will be held each August to honor Omar’s many contributions to the Belizean society and to assist in raising awareness for the Scholarship Foundation.

Omar was one of the most generous people you’ll ever meet as he gave of himself selflessly by giving of his time, advice and support wherever welcomed. He set the standard for generosity to many, and thru this foundation we hope to be a little more like him in our daily endeavors.

For more information on Omar Ortiz and the Scholarship Foundation visit https://www.oosf.org/.

PRESS RELEASE

BELIZE PORT AUTHORITY
WATER TAXI REGULATIONS STATUTORY INSTRUMENT 29 OF 2019

The public is hereby informed of the Water Taxi Regulations Statutory Instrument 29 of 2019 that is in effect.  The major provisions of the regulations include:

Effective 1 August 2019:

1. Issuance of Personal Flotation Devices to passengers over one-year old.
2. Submission of Passenger Manifests at least 15 minutes prior to scheduled departure time.  This requires passengers to provide their names. 
3. Cargo Restrictions: Operators are not allowed to carry Cargo with Passenger; only personal effects of passengers are allowed.  
4. Passengers’ activities onboard: Passengers who are considered to pose a threat to other passengers may be removed from the water taxi and charged. 

Effective 1 September 2019:

1. Water Taxi Permit: An operator is not permitted to operate a water taxi unless in possession of a valid permit and Seaworthiness Certificate issued by the Belize Port Authority. 
2. Passenger Fee: A passenger user fee of $1.00 will be included in the passenger fare on the purchase of a ticket. 

For more information on the new requirements, kindly contact:
Belize Port Authority
Tel: (501)-222-5665/5666 or
Email: [email protected]     Website: www.portauthority.bz

“Maritime Service, Security, & Efficiency
—–END OF RELEASE—-

Across the turquoise water by the mangrove, ranger Allan Halliday spots a fishing skiff. “We’re going over to say hello,” he says, before abruptly changing the boat’s direction. But his real task is to check the couple on board have the licence to fish in this part of the Port Honduras Marine Reserve, one of nine designated zones in Belize.

“We aren’t complaining but others do,” says Alonzo Reymundo, of the rules that now restrict Belize’s 3,000 commercial fishers to two geographic areas each. He and his wife Anselma have been fishing off southern Toledo for 30 years and their boat is laden with 50 or so pounds of shrimp – more than enough, he says, flashing his licence. Today’s catch will be sold as bait and fetch around 330BZ$ (£135), he says.

But not all encounters are as friendly for the rangers from the Toledo Institute for Development and Environment (Tide), whose job includes enforcing the managed access (MA) programme that since 2016 has given traditional fishers the rights to secured grounds if they obtain licences and report their catch. Illegal fishing has declined, says Halliday, but at night there are illicit incursions from Guatemala and high-speed chases around the reserve’s 500-square miles of pristine sea – a vast space to monitor for just four rangers alternating shifts at their station on Abalone Caye.

Covering all of Belize’s waters, the MA scheme is unique, says fisheries administrator Beverly Wade. “Belize is the only country in the world that has successfully divided all its territorial waters, including functional fishing waters. We direct all fishermen into two of nine areas to build an architecture from the ground up, where a constituent takes ownership of resources because their livelihood depends on it.”

The programme is just part of a groundbreaking approach to ocean protection that has won the tiny country in Central America a reputation as a world leader.

Most recently, in April, Belize expanded the replenishment or “no-take” zones in its marine protected areas from 4.5% to 11.6%, almost tripling zones where fishing is banned, to rebuild fish populations and protect marine habitats. “Nowadays it’s sexy to say ‘this is a no-take area’ somewhere miles out at sea,” says Wade, at her office in Belize City, “but our no-take zone of 16% is a giant achievement for a tiny country like Belize, because all our protected areas are right where people are interacting on a daily basis. That is the hardest thing to achieve.”

While in other Caribbean countries like Jamaica and the Bahamas, overfishing has depleted stocks of lobster and conch, such steps are helping ensure this does not happen in Belize, she says. MA has had faster results than anticipated, with an estimated 60% fall in illegal fishing, benefiting the two primary seafood exports. “The fact that our lobster and conch have remained stable is a direct indicator of the success of the combination of protected areas and managed access,” says Wade.

Other countries could learn from how Belize persuaded its fishers to give up open access to its waters, says Nicanor Requena, who spent almost a decade visiting remote fishing communities with the US-based Environmental Defence Fund (EDF). “At first they didn’t want to know, but we gained their trust by listening to them, and fishers’ traditional knowledge played a huge part in shaping the programme,” he says.

That message has even been echoed in a weekly radio drama about a fictional fishing village called Punta Fuego, with storylines about illegal fishing and characters tempted to make a quick Belizean dollar, with a phone-in to discuss the risks.

But it was two pilot programmes in the Port Honduras and Glover’s Reef reserves that proved to fishers the rights system would secure their livelihoods and win ecological payback: the recovery and preservation of Belize’s outstanding barrier reef – the largest in the northern hemisphere – on which nearly 200,000 people rely because of tourism and fishing. Other countries, including Australia and the Philippines, have been taking note and looking to emulate tiny Belize.

Bordered by Mexico, Guatemala and the Caribbean sea, Belize is home to a 300km stretch of the Mesoamerican barrier reef, whose stunning array of fish includes whale sharks, angelfish and parrotfish, and dozens of species of coral. In what was hailed as a hugely significant point for marine conservation worldwide, the reef was removed from Unesco’s World Heritage danger list in June 2018, after 10 years. That followed the introduction of regulations to protect mangroves and, crucially, a vote by Belize’s government for an indefinite moratorium on all new oil exploration in its waters, after thousands of citizens joined with environmental groups to push for a referendum on the issue. In its 2018 report card on the health of its reef Belize scored 2.8 – an improvement on 2.3 in 2006, though some way off the top score of five.

The gains are impressive but also fragile, says Nicole Auil Gomez, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, whose scientific research has played a leading role in conservation efforts. “Our actions have been moving faster than the legislation. Now we need laws to buttress this action. Everyone is waiting for the sustainable fisheries bill, which will close loopholes, for example, by making enforcement easier.”

Wade agrees that stiffer penalties in the long-awaited implementation of the bill would help. “Enforcement is our achilles heel because illegal fishing is so hard to police. We are a small country and simply don’t have the resources. We were confiscating boats but noticed the penalties weren’t as effective as they should be.”

At the national fishing cooperative in Belize City, today’s catch of spiny lobster are being processed as chairman Elmer Rodriguez listens to some fishermen complain that they don’t have licences because the machine that prints them has broken down. But all agree the key problem with MA is enforcement, especially of foreign fishers who still use gill nets that damage fish. There is not enough patrolling or monitoring, says Rodriguez. “Why should they follow the rules when others just break them?”

In Toledo, Tide’s executive director Celia Mahung says: “I strongly believe the government needs to budget for enforcement. The cost of fuel is so high and NGOs don’t get tax reduction to buy fuel, although they are doing the government’s work.”

Talking to environmentalists in Belize, there is a clear sense of pride in their success, along with fishers, scientists, the government and others, but also pressure to keep up sustainable initiatives. A bigger commitment is needed from the tourist industry, which accounts for almost 40% of GDP, they say.

One species that is still suffering the effects of overfishing is the Nassau grouper fish whose declining numbers are like “watching extinction in action”, says Auil Gomez.

Compounding the challenges is the climate crisis. Emerging threats include Belize’s white sand beaches being swamped by sargassum ocean seaweed and the arrival of the mysterious stony coral disease, which is believed to be linked to warming ocean waters.

“The weather is more unpredictable, the seas are rougher and fishers have to go farther out. We have seen a lot of coastal erosion,” says Mahung, adding that the shrinking numbers and size of fish are forcing communities to look for new sources of income.

Before heading back to the mainland, the Tide rangers stop for lunch in Punta Negra, where village chairperson Paula Jacobs Williams serves red snapper and rice in the building that used to be the school. She co-runs this restaurant with three other women, as part of a project to diversify income in fishing communities. A few years ago 250 people lived here; now there are just 35.

“About 10 years ago they told us we should move because the sea was going to wash us away and every year it’s worse. Now the water is lapping at the steps of my house,” she says. “But I am not going anywhere else. The women of Punta Negra have a lot of talents.”

Despite the challenges, says Requena of the EDF, Belize’s natural wonders continue to offer up surprises. In 2012–2013 scientists discovered a largely unknown area of the reef with unusually rich and varied wildlife and virtually intact coral. They are still working to uncover how this area, which known as the Corona reef, has survived in its unspoilt state in the hope of learning how to increase resilience elsewhere.

“Belize is a little corner of the northern hemisphere where people and nature really are working together,” says Requena. “This is the vision for the future.”

There is one final detour on the way back to the mainland, as the rangers head into an area that’s a known habitat for manatees. The marine reserve was established in 2000 to protect local populations of the gentle sea giants who rely on the freshwater. There is a swirl of mud beneath the sea and then five whiskered manatees resurface to breathe. “Not long ago the manatees in this area were disappearing because fishers from Guatemala used to poach them,” says Halliday. “But they are back. We turned it around.”

Source: The Guardian

PRESS RELEASE – Launch of the Belize Tax Service Department 

August 1st, 2019 marks the historic amalgamation of the Income Tax Department and Department of General Sales Tax into the newly formed Belize Tax Service Department- a department under the Ministry of Finance.  The amalgamation will be done in a phased approach through to 2022. Taxpayers will experience better service by a newly trained cadre of tax professionals, efficiency, productivity and better tax compliance to further develop the country.

In October 2014, the Fiscal Affairs Department (FAD) approved a technical assistance mission to support the Government of Belize’s medium-term action plan to Modernize Tax Administration.  The objective of that program was to strengthen institutional reforms in tax administration.

In January 2018, on the request of the Government of Belize, a Caribbean Regional Technical Assistance Center (CARTAC) mission was deployed to assess the current operations and technology systems that support tax administration in Belize and provide guidance and advice to support the decision process to evaluate alternative technology solutions for the Tax Administration’s operations.

The Government of Belize established a Program Office for the Modernization of the Tax Administration of Belize (MTAB) and appointed a Program Manager in October 2018. The main objective of the program is to establish a modern service-oriented Tax Administration, integrated with other government agencies and financial institutions, all businesses and the citizens of Belize. It will also achieve a redesigned business operation according to the current good practices and standards for tax administrations, deliver services to taxpayers and optimally use its own human resources and knowledgeable staff to manage compliance according to risks utilizing a wide range of internal and third-party data.
The Program introduces significant changes in legal, organizational, operational and technology frameworks for administering taxes in Belize. 

The Belize Tax Service Department aims to serve as Tax Professionals of the future, with a new mission, vision and values.

Ends

If you’re older than 30, like me, you probably have fond memories of a day at the “Animal Park” with your entire family. What beautiful days those were…

Well, Creme De La Creme is bringing back good, clean family-friendly days at the reinvented park by the lighthouse! They adopted what was previously known as the “San Cas Park” and, with sponsorship from the Belize City Council and awesome businesses like SMART, they’ve installed male and female bathrooms, a new play set, cleaned, painted, landscaped, and even replaced lighting.

The new ice cream smoothie shack (their frozen drinks are a-ma-zing! Not to mention their famous paletas varieties!) and snack shop (with their loaded burgers) are welcome additions to give the entire family a relaxed and satisfying evening at the park. A portion of the revenues from the ice cream shack and snack shop go directly into the upkeep of the park and restrooms.

To add to the enjoyment of the kiddos, they’ve even added a trampoline and bouncy house which costs a mere $3 per 15 minute stint and can be paid for at the ice cream shop. Businesses like these deserve to be supported and encouraged, as it takes an entire community to keep these efforts alive. Visit Creme De La Creme by the Lighthouse Park and support a worthy and invaluable cause.

Creme De La Creme – Making a Difference one bite at a time!