Sir Barry Bowen; famous and rich Belizean
Hyfler/Rosner
History
SIR BARRY BOWEN KILLED IN AIR CRASH IN SAN PEDRO
With a First Look at His Role in Modern Belize History
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/thread.jspa?threadID=1883050
Sir Barry Bowen, 64, a seventh-generation Belizean, the
country's most prominent entrepreneur and one of Belize's
wealthiest men, a former Senator and financier of the
People's United Party, died Friday, February 26, 2010, in
the crash of a private airplane he was piloting.
The accident occurred about 5:30 p.m. on approach to the
3000-foot airstrip at San Pedro, Ambergris Caye, the resort
island off the coast of Belize where Sir Barry had a home.
Four other people in the modified Cessna 206 with turbine
Rolls-Royce engine also died in the crash: Michael Casey and
Jill Casey, both teachers at Gallon Jug Community School on
the Gallon Jug Estate, the Bowen property in northwestern
Belize, and their two young children, 2 1/2-year-old Makayla
and 5-month-old Bryce. The Caseys, from Albany, NY, had been
teachers at Gallon Jug for nine years.
The cause of the crash is as yet unknown, although observers
noted that there had been unusually high winds during the
day. Either the wing or the fixed landing gear of the Cessna
is believed to have clipped a barge pole. The aircraft then
lost a wing and came to rest in a swampy area on the back
side of the island.
Sir Barry had been a licensed pilot for 43 years and almost
daily flew his plane from Belize City, where his companies
were based, to San Pedro. He formerly was a director of
Belize's first national airline, Belize Airways Limited,
established in 1976.
The Bowen business interests in Belize are extensive. They
include Bowen and Bowen, Ltd., founded by Barry Bowen's
father, Eric Bowen, which became the exclusive Belize
bottler for Coca-Cola soft drinks and Crystal bottled water;
Belize Brewing Company, which brews Belikin, Lighthouse and
Belikin Supreme lager beers, Belikin stout and, under
license, Guinness stout, and almost completely dominates the
beer market in Belize; Belize Aquaculture Ltd., a large
shrimp farm near Placencia in Stann Creek District; Gallon
Jug Estate, a 130,000-acre tract in Orange Walk District
that includes Chan Chich Lodge, a world-renowned jungle
lodge, and Gallon Jug Agro-Industries, a 3,000-acre
experimental farm that produces organic coffees (the only
commercial coffee production in Belize), cacao and cattle;
and Belize Estate Co., the Ford auto and truck dealership in
Belize City.
Sir Barry, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2008
and was Honorary General Consul to Belize for the Kingdom of
Norway, is survived by his wife, Dixie Summerscales Bowen,
five children, several grandchildren and other family
members.
A state funeral is set for Tuesday in Belize City.
A Central Figure in Belize's Modern History
Barry Bowen not only was the most prominent and best-known
businessman in Belize, whose products touched nearly every
Belizean and every visitor to Belize, but he also was a
central figure in the political and economic history of
modern Belize and a key link to the British Honduras past.
Although just in his mid-60s, Bowen's career connected in
some way to nearly every major development in the history of
Belize. He owned the most storied (and also at times the
most hated) business enterprise in the country's history,
Belize Estate and Produce Company; he was a pioneer in the
two industries that now dominate commerce in Belize,
agriculture and tourism; he was a supporter, leader and
major financier of the most powerful political party in the
country, the People's United Party; and he proved himself
one of the toughest and most capable entrepreneurs in modern
Belize, using a combination of savvy marketing, hardball
tactics and government connections to make Belikin beer and
Coca-Cola soft drinks his personal cash cows.
Bowen could trace his roots in Belize back to the middle of
the 18th century, when the first Bowen, from England,
disembarked from a British ship and joined the ragtag band
of Baymen at an encampment at the mouth of the Belize River.
Over the decades, the Bowen family in British Honduras
counted among its member a number of notables, including a
physician and several successful business people and
merchants.
Belize Estate and Produce Company
Barry Bowen's father, Eric Bowen, was not considered a
particularly wealthy man, at least not in terms of cash
flow, but as a "white Belizean" established in the British
colony since before the days of the St. George's Caye battle
with the Spanish, and with large real estate holdings, he
had considerable social status. The family lived on the
Southern Foreshore in Belize City. In the 1930s Eric started
a lemonade factory, Bowen and Bowen, which eventually under
his son, Barry, would become the highly profitable bottler
of Coca-Cola and other soft drinks and beverages.
Eric Bowen was the last colonial owner of the Belize Estate
and Produce Company. Belize Estate dates back at least to
1859, when the British Honduras Company, formed in England,
bought James Hyde & Co., which owned large amounts of land
in British Honduras. In 1875, the company changed its name
to Belize Estate and Produce. Eventually Belize Estate and
Produce Company owned over a million acres of land in
Belize, about one-fifth of the entire country.
Belize Estate primarily was involved in the lumber business,
cutting, sawing and exporting huge numbers of mahogany and
other tropical hardwood trees. It was in many ways a typical
colonial enterprise, exploiting the forests, exporting the
colony's valuable assets and not investing in proper forest
management programs. At one point the company, and its
Scots, English and German managers, owned or controlled
about one-half of all the private land in Belize. During the
late 19th century through the mid-20th century, it was the
most important economic and political force in Belize.
The Belize Estate and Produce Company was not known for its
progressive labor relations. Historians say it treated its
workers on the mahogany plantations almost like slaves,
although slavery had been abolished in British Honduras in
1838.
As long as the world mahogany market remained strong, Belize
Estate remained a powerful force in little Belize. However,
by the turn of the 20th century the mahogany business was in
decline, and if Belize prospered it was more from shipping
and the trans-shipping of goods from Britain and the U.S. to
other parts of Central America than from lumber.
In the aftermath of the devastating 1931 hurricane that
killed as many as 3,000 people around Belize City, and with
the Great Depression dragging down economic life in the
British colony and further limiting lumber exports, Belize
Estate began a period of decline.
In 1936, Robert Turton, a Creole millionaire who made his
fortune from exporting chicle, defeated the expat manager of
Belize Estate, C.H. Brown, in the first elections for
colonial Legislative Council seats. Brown's defeat marked
the beginning of the end of the domination of British
enterprises in Belize and the beginning of the rise of
Creole entrepreneurs with their commercial connections in
the United States.
The depression years of the 1930s are considered the
crucible of modern Belize. It was a time when workers
organized in labor unions and fought against the power of
old-line colonial leadership and of the Belize Estate and
Produce Company. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, the
labor unions, Belize nationalists and the Creole middle
class in Belize City collaborated to form the People's
United Party, which swept elections in 1954. With George
Price at the helm, the PUP won all Belize elections until
1984, the first national election after Belize independence
in 1981. The United Democratic Party, under Manuel Esquivel,
won in 1984, but the PUP returned to power in 1989.
Belikin's Heady Brew
In 1978, just before independence, Barry Bowen bought Bowen
and Bowen from his father. Bowen moved quickly to develop
and exploit the opportunities he saw in the backwater of
Belize. He developed the Coca-Cola franchise and turned
Belikin, first brewed in the late 1960s, into the national
drink of Belize.
Until Belikin came along, Belizeans mostly drank imported
Heineken and Guinness stout. With a local beer now
available, the PUP raised taxes on imports, and most
Belizeans turned to Belikin.
However, in the early 1970s, a challenger to Belikin came
along. Two brothers, Arturo and Orlando Matus, whose
ancestors came to Belize as refugees from the Caste War in
the Yucat�n, started Charger beer. Belizeans seemed to think
that Charger tasted better than Belikin.
The Matus brothers and Charger did well for a while, but
then, as the story goes, Bowen and Bowen started buying up
the empty Charger bottles. In Belize at that time all glass
containers were imported into the country, at considerable
cost. So bottling companies used only returnable bottles and
paid for their return. Bowen paid a premium for the bottles
and stored them in a warehouse. This eventually broke
Charger because the company had to keep importing expensive
bottles. The bank foreclosed on the company's loans, and
Charger went out of business, leaving Belikin as the only
beer in Belize.
While parts of this story may be apocryphal, and a similar
story is told about the way Bowen beat the Pepsi bottler in
Belize, it is undoubtedly true that Barry Bowen and his
managers were skilled beer marketers and operators. They
created a nationwide distribution system of wholesale
outlets and delivery trucks and barges that got beer to
every bar and store in the nation. They advertised freely,
became actively involved in community programs and developed
popular merchandising efforts like the Belikin calendar,
which annually features the most beautiful women of Belize.
Today, thanks in part to the virtual monopoly status granted
by the Belize government to Bowen Brewing, Belikin controls
nearly all of the beer market in Belize. The popular beers
of neighboring Guatemala and Mexico cannot be imported into
Belize, and only limited U.S. and foreign beers can be
brought into the country. Although under recently imposed
CARICOM rules beers such as Jamaica's Red Stripe and
Heineken brewed in St. Kitts must be allowed into the Belize
market, they are making little headway against the solidly
entrenched Belikin and related Bowen brands.
The Minute Maid Problem
In the mid-1980s, Bowen was involved in an even more
controversial, and potentially profitable, deal. Although
some of the details are shaded in history, Bowen purchased
or otherwise controlled nearly 700,000 acres of land in
Orange Walk District, a heritage of the Belize Estate and
Produce Company. Bowen reportedly planned to cut the
remaining timber in the Orange Walk tracts as fuel for a
wood-burning electric power station. However, Bowen ran into
problems, and to avoid foreclosure he entered a purchase
agreement with Coca-Cola Foods and a partnership of Houston
investor-oilman Paul Howell and banker-developer Walter
Mischer.
Malcolm Barnebey, a former U.S. ambassador to Belize, worked
as a consultant to Howell and Mischer. The two investors,
through Barnebey, reportedly paid US$6 million for some
100,000 acres and a 60% option on an additional 550,000
acres. This appeared to be a bargain price of under US$15 an
acre. About 30% of the parcel went to Houston-based
Coca-Cola Foods, which planned to grow oranges on at least
25,000 acres for its Minute Maid orange juice brand. This
was a hedge, in frost-free Belize, against losses of citrus
trees due to periodic cold weather in Florida (Minute Maid
had suffered severely in the winter of 1983). Mischer and
Howell got 30 percent of the land, and Bowen retained 40%.
Unfortunately for Coca-Coca and the entrepreneurs,
international conservationists got wind of the plan to clear
large areas of tropical forest. They threatened protests and
boycotts of Coca-Cola. A loose coalition of
conservationists, including the U.S. national Audubon
Society, the Massachusetts and Belize Audubon societies, New
York Zoological Society, Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife
Fund and World Resources Institute, joined together to fight
the land development deal.
Coca-Cola backed down, put plans for citrus growing in
Belize on hold, and Coke donated a large tract of the land
for a nature reserve. Barry Bowen divested himself of
another large tract. Combined, the land became Programme for
Belize's Rio Bravo Conservation and Management Area,
consisting of 260,000 acres, the largest private nature
reserve in Belize.
A Force in Aquaculture and an Innovator in Agriculture
Barry Bowen was an early adapter of advanced aquaculture
technology. Bowen established Belize Aquaculture Ltd. in
1996. In 1997, he built a shrimp breeding center and pilot
farm on the 14,000-acre Blair Atholl Estate in Stann Creek
District. After demonstrating that Pacific white leg shrimp
could be farmed successfully, using a technique called
bio-floc shrimp farming, which encourages bacteria-dominated
rather than algae-dominated shrimp ponds, he expanded
production and by 2001 was producing over one million pounds
of shrimp annually. Belize Aquaculture was the first
commercial bio-floc shrimp farm in the world. The company
claims that its technologies greatly reduce the impact on
the environment, with zero water exchange, no net loss of
mangroves and no salt water intrusion into fresh water
aquifers. BAL also built a state-of-the-art processing plant
capable of handling 60,000 pounds of shrimp in an eight-hour
shift.
While in aquaculture, Bowen went for volume, in agriculture
he looked more toward innovation on a fairly small scale. On
his 3,000-acre experimental farm at Gallon Jug, he imported
high-quality Arabica coffee plants from Guatemala and began
the first commercial coffee growing operation in Belize,
using organic methods. The best Arabica coffees grow at
elevations of 3,500 to 5,000 feet, so Belize is not ideal
for coffee production, but Gallon Jug Estate coffees have
proved popular, at least in a limited way.
Bowen also worked to develop a better type of beef for
Belize. He crossbred local cattle with British Herefords, by
artificial insemination, to produce tastier, less tough
steak and hamburgers. The positive results can be enjoyed at
the Riverside Tavern, a popular Bowen family restaurant in
Belize City, which arguably serves the best hamburgers in
Belize.
Gallon Jug also farms cacao.
Pioneer in Upscale Tourism
Tourism, along with agriculture, are the largest industries
in Belize. Barry Bowen seemingly never believed in the great
potential in mass tourism that some others saw, preferring
instead to invest in industries such as aquaculture.
Although he owned valuable seafront property on Ambergris
Caye, Belize's number one tourist destination, he didn't
open a resort there.
However, he did develop a pioneering upscale jungle lodge,
Chan Chich Lodge, on Gallon Jug Estate lands. Built
literally on top of a Maya plaza, the lodge has only 12
thatch-roof caba�as, plus a two-bedroom villa. Americans Tom
and Josie Harding supervised the construction of the lodge,
which opened in 1988, and stayed on as managers until 2001.
Ben and Amanda Dodge currently manage the lodge. (Amanda
Dodge is the sister of Jill Casey, who was killed in the
crash.) Chan Chich Lodge is widely considered among the top
few jungle lodges in Central America, and one of the best in
the world.
Bowen also was a director and investor in Belize Airways
Limited, Belize's first national airline. It was established
in 1976 and began service in 1977. The airline for a time
had a fleet of Boeing 720Bs, a version of the 707 that
seated 112, and linked the old Stanley International Airport
with Miami and San Salvador.
Controversies, Contradictions and Contributions
Barry Bowen's life was not without its controversies and
contradictions.
Although he actively supported many conservation causes, and
was a friend and supporter of the Belize Zoo and its
director Sharon Matolo, he was an advocate of the
construction of the Chalillo Dam, which Matolo strongly
opposed due to destruction of habitat for the Scarlet Macaw
and other birds and animals. Bowen said that Gallon Jug has
the healthiest population of wildlife in Belize and that
there is "no wildlife in the Chalillo area that is of any
more significance."
Bowen also was criticized by some, including some travel
writers, for building his jungle lodge on a Maya site. Lord
Smoking Shell, an ancient Mayan chief, will roll over in his
grave, wrote one. For his part, Bowen said the location of
the lodge protected the site from looters.
Although Bowen claimed his shrimp farm operations were
designed to protect the environment, some conservationists
in Placencia believed that Belize Aquaculture polluted the
Placencia Lagoon. Bowen wrote several feisty articles in The
Belize Times and other newspapers arguing his perspective
and putting down conservationists, such as Placencia
resident Mary Toy, who opposed him. He wrote, "I am very
proud of what I have contributed to the protection of our
environment. I apologize to no one for having made good
investments and I enjoy the appreciation shown to me by the
many people and organizations that I help on a constant
basis."
Known for his generous charitable contributions, Bowen once
donated US$50,000 to the construction of the Lion's Club
clinic in San Pedro. Through his efforts and loan guarantees
the bridge to North Ambergris finally was built.
Bowen and the woman who would become his wife, Dixie
Summerscales, established the Island Academy, a private
primary school in San Pedro. Dixie became director of the
school.
The two first met in 1980 in San Pedro. It was the second
marriage for both.
While praised for doing good, Bowen also was vigorously
attacked for his monopolistic control of the beer business
in Belize. A long-time PUP supporter, he reportedly helped
finance the party, and some political observers believed
that legislation giving Belize Brewing its monopoly was in
payment for Bowen's support.
Prime Minister Said Musa appointed him to the Belize Senate
in 1998, and Bowen served until he resigned in 2005. His
resignation was, in part, it is believed, due to his
opposition to higher excise taxes on beer imposed by the
PUP.
In 2008, Bowen joined with the Belize Landowners Association
in bringing an action against the government involving the
proposed amendment to Section Seventeen of the Belize
Constitution that, he claimed, would in effect take away
from private landowners guarantees of the protection from
deprivation of property, a right to compensation and a right
to access the courts, especially as regards petroleum and
mineral rights. Ironically, it has recently been noted that
Gallon Jug lands are a likely area for oil exploration.
None Like Him Again
Admired or distrusted, envied or loved, Sir Barry Bowen was
a one of a kind. He made his mark on nearly every major
event in his lifetime. Bold and full of life, ambitious and
willing to take a risk, a man of vision and large plans, he
was a multi-millionaire who achieved things. There will be
none like him again in Belize.
--By Lan Sluder, http://www.belizefirst.com