Fruit and vegetable vendors who are anxiously awaiting the completion of Phase Two of Fairchild Street Market Village will be able to move into their new stalls in a matter of weeks.
Following a tour of the project in which construction started in April, Minister of Agriculture and Food Security Indar Weir told Barbados TODAY he was satisfied the stalls would be completed by mid-October, paving the way for vendors to move in by the end of that same month.
He said he was pleased with the design of the general market space and the configuration of the stall facilities.
“As you know, we have already completed Phase One of the vendors’ market where the food and beverage stalls are located, and now we are on Phase Two which is closer to the main road where the fruit and vegetable vendors will be. I am happy with the progress I saw during my visit there this morning, I am very pleased with what I saw,” he said.
The first two phases of the Fairchild Street Market Village have been projected to cost $3.8 million. The facility will cater to 112 vendors and include 48 food and beverage stalls and two bathrooms. A car park will also be accommodated at the new location.
Several construction companies are working on the project.
Phase Two is being constructed on the same spot as the old market.
While there were concerns expressed during Phase One about the allocation of stall spaces, Minister Weir assured the fruit and vegetable vendors that their new spots would depend on the size of the stalls they occupied when they plied their trade at the old market.
“We allocated the size of stalls based on what people were doing previously. There is no way on earth that you are going to avoid people probably not being happy if someone has a stall that appears to be bigger than theirs.
“We had people who had a certain size stall and you give them back that size stall but then there were others who might have had a stall that was slightly bigger, and then people would say ‘how come this body got a bigger stall?’ And those are the types of things that people will engage in until they are settled. Then they realise that you were giving people back what they had,” Minister Weir explained.
