The government’s decision to import chicken wings for the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup is severely affecting the business of many small farmers, Barbados TODAY has learned.
As the industry grapples with the aftermath of imported chicken wings, the Barbados Agricultural Society (BAS) is now looking into marketing initiatives to help offload tons of homegrown poultry meat now in cold storage and support domestic farmers.
The farmers have complained that the influx of imported wings has flooded the domestic market, making it extremely difficult for them to sell their own product.
As a result, they have been forced to put a significant amount of their stock, over 34 000 pounds, into cold storage.
James Paul, the BAS’s chief executive officer, declared several factors contributed to the current predicament facing the industry. He criticised the government’s “bad decision” to import the wings and acknowledged that stakeholders in the food supply chain had not planned properly.
“A lot of farmers have said that they have had difficulty selling local poultry products,” Paul told Barbados TODAY.
Ice cream maker BICO’s cold storage arm is “fully stocked with local poultry products and we still have farmers producing poultryall the time”, he said.
He suggested that the BAS may have to examine whether special promotions in the market would boost chicken wing purchases.
“But, it is a problem at the moment in terms of trying to bring down the local stocks of poultry,” he said, stressing that the World Cup, like other major events such as Crop Over, was not food focus but centred on a party atmosphere.
“There’s only a certain amount of poultry that can be consumed and remember weknew from the very start that there were only ten contact days for the World Cup and there’s only so much chicken that could be sold in that particular period of time,” he explained. “One of the things historically that we have observed in Barbados is that even when you have events like Crop Over, we don’t sell as much products as we think we do because people are more into the feting and stuff and consumption of alcoholic drinks. So in other words, when it comes to eating, a lot of food does not sell as much as people anticipate, these events don’t really help us as far as that is concerned.
“It is not the same as Christmas time and Easter time, that is different. Clearly, it (the importation) has caused a problem and what we want to do is to look and see what marketing initiatives we would have to undertake at this point in time to offload that poultry meat that is there in cold storage.”
In April, Minister of Agriculture Indar Weir announced that the government was lifting the 2023 ban on chicken wings as the sole importer – the state-owned Barbados Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation – would import two 40-foot containers of wings for the June tournament.
Paul also admitted that some farmers had been unwilling to share necessary industry data, which could have helped make more accurate food production forecasts. He stressed the importance of stakeholders working together and sharing information to enable better planning for the future.
“When producers . . . in poultry . . . pork or whatever withhold data from the government, from a planning perspective, it does not permit us as an industry to plan effectively in terms of dealing with the future,” he said.
The Barbados Egg and Poultry Producers (BEPPA) had previously opposed the government’s decision to lift the 2023 ban on chicken wing imports, warning that it would have a “devastating impact” on the industry. BEPPA board member Amir Juman, executive director of Fasons Food Inc., described the move as “extremely unplanned and reckless”.
Paul acknowledged that even though the government’s decision was questionable, producers also bore some responsibility for not providing the necessary data.
He emphasised the need for greater collaboration and transparency within the industry to prevent such situations from occurring in the future.
He said: “If we continue to see each other as adversaries and not work together, we at the same time will not be achieving much. Then when we fall down the public of Barbados will turn and blame us and then the politicians unfortunately will say ‘you all don’t know what you all are doing so we have to make decisions’ and usually the decisions that they make are bad decisions because they are operating sometimes on false information.”
The BAS chief executive also pointed out that chicken wings have little nutritional value, which is concerning when Barbadians are being encouraged to adopt healthier eating habits amid the island’s noncommunicable disease epidemic. sheriabrathwaite@barbadostoday.bb
