While government works at bringing the country's debt under control there is the question of how effective they are being. Today Governor of the Central Bank Sydney Campbell told the press that the country's reserves are at less than ideal standards of having only one and a half months worth of reserves.
Sydney Campbell, Governor of Central Bank
"The last check I had, about a week ago, it was, the number would have been approximately one point five months of imports we would have and that is based on how we estimate what would be the coverage for Belize going forward and therefore to put it in dollars term, it would be approximately close to, without trying to be wrong, it would be about sixty one million U.S. dollars we would have."
Alfonso Noble,
Is this a critical level?
Sydney Campbell,
"Well the higher it would be the best it would be for us, the higher the reserve we have. There is a rule of thumb which says that you should always try to maintain, reach a target of three months of imports. So that is where we are trying to achieve. I could say that if we do a projection forward, we would expect that that one point five months of imports would substantially improve over the next six months to a year."
Campbell says that acceptable rates for reserves should be at least 3 months. And while that's the ideal our information that in the past the reserves have dipped to as low as 3 weeks. That's not projected to happen with the bolstering of the IDB loan coming later this month as well as the Venezuelan loan coming on stream.