Belize is too small, the national excuse that explains nothing

By Horace Palacio: Every country has a national anthem. Belize has two. The official one we sing on September mornings, and the unofficial one we recite every single day of the year.

Belize too small.

Why are prices so high? Belize too small, we have to import everything. Why are the roads broken? Belize too small, the tax base cannot support them. Why does investment pass us by? Belize too small, the market is not worth it. Why does nothing seem to work? Small country, my friend. What can you do?

Today I want to put that anthem on trial. Because I have checked the evidence, and the evidence says our favorite excuse is a fraud.

Take the excuses one by one.

Excuse number one. Things are expensive because we are small and import everything.

Now meet Iceland. A volcanic rock in the freezing North Atlantic, hours by air from anywhere, with about 390,000 people. Almost exactly our population. It grows little, manufactures less, and imports nearly everything it touches, across an ocean, not up a highway from Mexico. By our anthem, Iceland should be poor and broken. Instead it stands among the wealthiest, healthiest, best functioning nations on earth.

So smallness alone does not explain our prices. What explains our prices? The things this column has named all year. A handful of importers controlling whole categories with no competition to fear. A costly, inefficient port taxing every item that lands. Government duties stacked on the basics of survival. And the greatest absurdity of all, a fertile farming country importing food it could grow in its own backyard. None of that is geography. All of that is choices.

Excuse number two. The roads are bad because a small population pays small taxes.

Now meet Barbados. An island of about 280,000 people, one third smaller than Belize, with less land, no border with anyone, and famously well kept roads, schools, and institutions. Fewer taxpayers than us. Better pavement than us. How?

And do not pretend our treasury is empty. Well over a billion and a half Belize dollars flows through government hands every single year, thousands of dollars for every man, woman, and child in this country. The question was never how little water enters the bucket. Readers of this column know the question by heart. It is the holes. The padded contract. The project that costs three times the estimate. The road paved thin before elections and gone by the next rainy season. Barbados is not richer in taxpayers. It leaks less. That is why the procurement portal the Prime Minister has promised matters so much, and why this column will hold him to it.

Excuse number three. We are too small a market to attract investment.

This one sounds sophisticated and is the emptiest of all. Serious investors have never cared about the size of your domestic market. They care what they can produce in your country and sell to the world from it. Singapore built its miracle exporting to everyone else. Costa Rica, our own neighbor, convinced global medical device makers to manufacture there, not because Costa Ricans buy many pacemakers, but because Costa Rica made itself a superb place to produce them. And Belize sits two hours from the largest consumer market in human history, with trade access through CARICOM and beyond. The shelf was never too small. The offer was.

Excuse number four. We are too small to run modern institutions.

Meet Estonia, 1.3 million people, which digitized virtually its entire government, taxes filed in minutes, records online, bureaucracy shrunk to a phone screen. And here is the secret they will tell you themselves. They could do it because they were small. A small ship turns fast. One good reform in a small country reaches every citizen in months, not decades. Smallness is not our disability. Properly used, smallness is our speed.

And now allow me to demolish the anthem’s very foundation, because here is the fact almost no Belizean ever says out loud.

Belize is not even small.

In land, we are nearly nine thousand square miles. That is larger than Israel, a nation that built a technology superpower on less territory than ours, most of it desert. It is larger than El Salvador, which holds more than six million people on less land than we occupy with four hundred and twenty thousand. We are not a small country. We are an empty one, land rich and people few, which by every rule of arithmetic should make land cheap, farming vast, and opportunity wide. That it does not, I wrote about last week, and the cause was not geography then either.

Now, fairness, because this column does not sell fairy tales. Smallness carries real costs. A small population means some industries never reach efficient scale. One hurricane is a national event for us and a regional story for a giant. Every talented emigrant hurts us more than he would hurt Mexico. True, true, and true.

But watch what the successful small nations did with those exact constraints. They did not recite them. They engineered around them. Too small for mass production? Then win on niche and quality, the Iceland way, the Malta way, the way one Belizean woman named Marie Sharp already proved from a pepper field in Stann Creek. Too small a home market? Then the world is your market, the Singapore way. Too many children abroad? Then the diaspora is your reserve army, the Cabo Verde and Curacao way, small nations our size who just marched into a World Cup while we watched on television reciting our anthem.

A constraint is a design problem. An excuse is a surrender. The difference between the two is that a problem demands a solution while an excuse forbids one.

And that is the real reason we love the anthem so much. Be honest. Belize too small is comfortable because geography has no name and no address. Nobody resigns over a map. Blame the size and no minister is questioned, no contractor audited, no voter ashamed. The excuse is anesthesia. It numbs beautifully, and it heals absolutely nothing.

So let us retire it. The next time someone tells you prices are high because Belize is small, ask them about Iceland. When they say the roads are bad because the tax base is small, ask them about Barbados. When they say investment will not come because the market is small, ask them about Costa Rica. And when they say we are too small to matter at all, remind them we hold more land than Israel and that nations our exact size are playing in World Cups.

Belize was never too small to succeed.

Belize is exactly the right size to be excellent, small enough to turn fast, big enough in land to feed and house every child born here.

What we have lacked was never square miles or citizens. It is the courage to bury our second anthem, and to start acting like the country we actually are.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, Horace Palacio, and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.

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