Marine Multibeam and Sea Seep Survey has been cancelled

UPDATE: via phone call on Friday, January 14th 2017, Chief Executive Officer for the Ministry of Economic Development and Petroleum, Sharman Hyde verbally confirmed that the intended seismic and multi-beam surveys have been cancelled; and that the company, TGS has also been informed. Written confirmation of this has yet to be released by the Ministry. Oceana and allied partners in the Belize Coalition to Save Our Natural Heritage have called on key agencies like the Belize Tourism Board, the Fisheries Department and the Ministry of Tourism to publicly declare their position on offshore oil. This threat, this time is cancelled. What about the next time? Belize and Belizeans deserve to know if the Government of Belize is saying "yes" to offshore oil. The time is always right to do the right thing.

Oceana Belize

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Janelle Chanona - VP, Oceana Belize

"We did receive notice from the Chief Executive Officer in the Ministry of Petroleum and Economic Development who advised us that the surveys were cancelled. So, we have that in writing now, but I think these kinds of events and the reaction we are getting is that people are saying yes, those ships left that threat is taken care of, but we want to be sure that we don't always have to be keeping an eye out or trying to find out what is happening behind the scenes, that we don't know about until the last minute as with what happened with seismic and multibeam last year was attempted to be; so I think these kinds of events really show that people want to be engaged they want to be involved, they want to be aware of what's happening because they see the connections between their lives and these resources and they see what oil has already done to communities just like ours. The update is that we have written as the coalition, we want to meet with whomever will meet with us from the government we have also asked for a copy of the policy based moratorium, one of the letters that we got late in 2016 was saying the government intended to maintain a policy based moratorium that kind of flows that that would be a written document, something that we could read and review, we have yet to get a copy of that policy based moratorium so we have written again for that document."

The Ministry did not give a reason why the survey was cancelled.