A Million Dollars for Immediate Fire Relief

Wildfires continue to burn across Toledo and Cayo districts. With no rains forecasted in these areas, at least for the next few days, residents will continue to remain on high alert. Prime Minister John Briceño says his administration is doing everything it possibly can to put out the fires and assist victims. We spoke with the prime minister following today’s house meeting where he informed reporters that one million dollars have been set aside from government’s five-million-dollar contingency fund to offer immediate relief to fire victims in both districts. P.M. Briceño also touched on the issue of slash and burn, which is believed to be one of the primary causes of these fires. He, like the Area Representative for Toledo East said last week, believes that the method should be done away with and replaced with a safer farming practices. Here is what he told reporters.

 

Prime Minister John Briceño

“I think the first thing we need to accept is that the way we do things ten years ago, twenty years ago can no longer happen. The issue of slash and burn is something of the past. Now in agriculture we have to be using science and technology. I like to use the story of my grandfather who was a hundred and two years old and he was a subsistence farmer. He knew when it was time to fall bush, when it was time to burn and time to plant. But if he was alive today, he would be totally confused because things have changed dramatically. So the first lesson is that we have to understand that we cannot continue the ways of the old. We have to do better. What have we been doing, well we have been doing a lot of work. I need to give credit to our ministers, they have been on the ground not profiling but actually working, mobilizing resources and it is almost like all hands-on deck. All the different ministries that can help, from Human Development, Housing, MIDH, Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry. All of us are on board. But at the same time, we quickly realize that this was not a fire like other times so we needed to declare it a national disaster. By doing that we can then access international resources. We have wrote to the IDB and CABIE and both of them have already responded that they are going to assist us. We are using some resources from the contingency fund in the budget. WE have five million dollars aside for emergencies. So in Cabinet we decided we will be using a million dollars. We know that this is not enough, but this is just to get things going in the meantime. But we know that we have to be looking at food, that many of our farmers up to Tuesday, I don’t think we had any houses burning down, but we knew that a lot of them their milpas burn down, some of them their corn houses burn down. So we are working with human development and agriculture to see what is the best way to do something that is sustainable.”