In the late 1980s, the then Chairman of Fyffes, a company owned by Irish interests, Mr. John Ellis, a visionary leader and ardent supporter of the Belizean banana industry, collaborated with Craig Griffith, a former investment banker, and sought the assistance of the Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC), Barclays Bank International, and Fyffes to secure funding for the construction of the Port of Big Creek. This significant investment, in conjunction with support from the Government of Belize and other multilateral organizations, helped spur the growth of the banana industry in Belize, which had previously been struggling with limited acreage and manual operations. Today, the once fragile industry has expanded to 7,000 acres, and the manual operations have been transformed into a full deep-water port terminal facility, capable of handling 5-6 million boxes of bananas annually.