The press caught the prime minister today in San Pedro today for the Joint Annual Meeting of the Bonn Challenge and the 20X20 Initiative on Restoring Degraded Lands. The Initiative 20x20 is a country-led effort with the objective of protecting and restoring 350 million hectares of forests, farms, pasture, and other landscapes by 2030. Leaders, Investors, and technical partners in the Latin American and Caribbean region were a part of the meeting, including Minister of Sustainable Development, Orlando Habet, and Minister of Agriculture, Jose Mai.
Today, the prime minister told us more about this meeting, and Belize's role.
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"As you all know that Belize took over the presidency of SICA and one of the more active and more important arms of SICA is the CCAD, that's the environment arm and what they do, the minister of the environment of Central America meet constantly in looking at the challenges that we meet in Central America, the issue of climate change, drugs and so and how we can collaborate as a region and then using that opportunity to be able to raise funds to be able to both financial and technical resources so that we can implement the plans that we have for the region. Minister Habet who is now the pro-tem president for the CCD, has been doing an excellent job. The meetings they have is a testament to what they are doing, because we have not only ministers from Central America, but also from the Dominican Republic, Chile and I think its Peru that we have here. So it shows the level of importance that CCD plays in the region and the work that we are attempting to do."
"I'm sure you could find examples of where we've been bad at it and certainly when it comes to agriculture, the large scale agriculture that we have and we've been having that kind of discussion in cabinet whereby we have to ensure that the work with our agricultural farmers to ensure that they do not clean a hundred percent of the land, that we could set aside some parcels of some areas of the land to be able to protect the land, because when you remove all the land and all the trees and so forth the vegetation and then we have soil run offs and that leads to degradation and that leads to decertification of the area and we have to make sure that that does not happen. Belize is a good example of where more and more our farmers and people in the NGO community, the people in tourism understand the importance of protecting our land and so many countries come to Belize to see the work that we are doing."
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