Belize News,SAN PEDRO DAILY,January 3, 2007,Features,Newspapers, Information,Resource,Caribbean,Ambergris Caye

Dollars in the sand

Tourism is a modern global marvel. Every year, according to the World Tourism Organization, 700 million people leave for foreign lands. They spend more than $575 billion, making tourism the world's leading item of foreign trade.
Fifteen million of those travelers, mainly from North America, head for the Caribbean, which is by far the most tourist-dependent region of the world. On smaller islands like St. Lucia, tourism's contribution to the economy exceeds 70 percent, and the annual number of visitors far exceeds the resident population: Antigua's 64,000 residents put out the welcome mat for 231,000 visitors one recent year. Why do the tourists come? Most analysts cite the three S's: Sun, Sand and Sea. Others add a fourth: Sex. The sex part is gender-neutral, as a stroll though Ocho Rios immediately confirms. Wickedly handsome young men with flowing dreadlocks, some dyed blond, provide rent-a-dread services for women of every nationality. For most, it is a four-day fling; for a few, there is the hope that life will imitate art and, like Stella, they'll get their groove back. More

Teachers Union works on AIDS education

When it comes to changing a society's behaviour there are few forces more powerful than it's teachers. Today that professional body in Belize took a major step toward joining in the nation's efforts to deal with the AIDS crisis.
Anthony Fuentes, National President, B.N.T.U.
“The Belize National Teacher Union must play a critical, active and proactive role in fighting not only HIV and AIDS, but also stigma, isolation, discrimination, which threatens our human and constitutional rights of both our teachers and our students.”
To fulfil that mandate, for the next three days twenty members of the Belize National Teachers Union will be learning all about HIV and AIDS ... and how to spread that knowledge to fellow teachers and students. More

Caribbean Single Market Underway

The new year started with a lot of work for Caribbeans, whose greatest priority is to join to consolidate regional integration, especially in the economic field. So it was said by CARICOM Secretary General Edwin Carrington, who called for Caribbean countries to increase their commitment to reinforce the single market program. He said members of the private sector, workers, enterprises, and all Caribbean countries should be involved in this task. The Caribbean Single Market and Economy initiative covers greater monetary cooperation, market integration, common policies, investments, corporative changes, regulations for exchange and interest rates. With this instrument, Caribbean professionals from the whole area will be free to look for jobs in every CARICOM member country. Members of the project are Barbados, Belize, Guyana, Jamaica, Surinam and Trinidad and Tobago, while the entry of Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is expected. More

BELIZE: Gov't wants int'l body to deal with territorial dispute

Prime Minister Said Musa says he believes the decades-old territorial dispute with Guatemala will not be resolved by negotiations and wants the matter dealt with by an independent international tribunal. Both countries have been utilising the services of the Organisation of American States (OAS) to resolve the dispute that started with Guatemala's claim more than a hundred years ago. In September 2002, specially appointed negotiators, Sir Shridath Ramphal, the former Commonwealth Secretary General, who is representing Belize, and Paul Reichler for Guatemala, presented their proposals, but that document was later shelved indefinitely. More

Belizean flagged ship de-registered for threatening whalers

It is a common practice for vessels that engage in illegal fishing to be punished by the nation whose flag they happen to fly. But last week, instead of a rogue fisherman being sanctioned it was a ship suspected of engaging in radical environmental action that lost its papers. According to a release from IMMARBE, the International Merchant Marine Registry of Belize, the motor vessel "Farley Mowat" was registered to fly the Belize flag on December fifteenth as a pleasure craft that would also conduct research on the Belize Barrier Reef. Subsequent investigations, however, revealed that the ship was in Australian waters about to embark on an all too familiar mission to ram and otherwise interfere with ships engaged in whaling. The owners of "Farley Mowat" admitted to IMMARBE that the ship would be put on loan to the Sea Shepard Conservation Society, a militant environmental group which since 1979 has engaged in various aggressive actions against the whaling industry, including sabotage and ramming. According to the IMMARBE release, although Belize has voted with the anti-whaling bloc at the International Whaling Commission, it cannot condone acts that threaten life and property at sea. Consequently, the "Farley Mowat" was de-registered by IMMARBE on December twenty-ninth. Although in its early years as a "flag of convenience" registry IMMARBE earned a reputation for laxity, it has recently cleaned up its act to the point where it is one of only nine registries in the world to hold the U.S. Coastguard QUALSHIP 21 certification. More

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