BAMBOO FURNITURE WINS $80,000 GRANT IN BELIZE

Rattan chair, made in Belize.



HUMMINGBIRD FURNITURE COMPANY OF BELMOPAN

Hummingbird Furniture Company and entrepreneurial business that started making furniture in 1987 in the garage has now grown through exporting, from a one man business to a fifty person business. Robert Lopez is the owner of the company. He got a tax exemption back in 1987 to bring in some equipment and since then he has grown. The company now employs 50 persons on a full time basis and 10 students as part timers. His main market are tourist hotels and resorts. Hummingbird Furnishings just won an AWARD of $80,000 Bz.
Pioneers of Prosperity an international outfit, awarded them with the grant. Abby Noble, country director, the local guy did the honors. In order to qualify, a new entrepreneurial business that is making a profit, has to APPLY first. Their gross has to be over a $100,000 usa, or $200,000 Belize. The company also has to answer a lot of questions by international phone calls on the second round of checks. The third round involves an in depth investigation of the company. Hummingbird Furniture specializes in bamboo furniture. They will use the GRANT to plant more bamboo.
There is also a REGIONAL COMPETITION and this event will be held in Jamaica. The competitors are from Belize, Bahamas, Barbados, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica and Trinidad/Tobago.
The Pioneers Program is sponsored by the Mulilateral Investment Fund of the International Development Bank, also the John Templeton Foundation and the Social Equity Venture Fund.
It is the belief of Democratic Capitalist countries, that entrepreneurship is the way for the economic success of nations. This conflicts with the current rise of ALBA in the Americas, a socialist philosophy, that is anti-private, for profit entrepreneurship, in which the STATE under a DICTATOR is the owner of all property, means of production and the citizens themselves as possessions of the state. ( serfs or slaves ) The only example of the Leninist/Marxist model in the Americas is Cuba and they have never been able to support themselves in over 50 years. Right now Raul Castro, DICTATOR of CUBA is worried by the loss of STATE TOURISM REVENUES in the world recession and cannot afford to keep importing food to feed the Cuban people on a fixed food ration system. Yet in an helicopter flight, Raul Castro this past month, as DICTATOR of the prison island of Cuba, he found oodles of idle government land surrounding towns and cities in Cuba, which could be farmed. As dictator he is struggling with the idea of limited entrepreneurship to lower CUBAN food import bills, to encourage farming by private for profit individuals. To be an entreprenuer in CUBA is a state crime punished by years in jail. Usually in the history of the old RUSSIAN FEDERATION this partial state permission did not work, and such farmers eventually were killed in GULAGS, or otherwise as bourgeois counter-revolutionaries, if they became successful in a for profit venture as an entrepreneur. The PIONEERS for PROSPERITY believe the opposite, that it is only by harnessing the SELF INTEREST of the individual, to improve their personal life, through entrepreneurship that you can build an economic future for the citizen and the nation.