At a major national agricultural policy colloquium held this week, a decades-long Barbadian food producer has issued a stark warning about the unsustainable profit inequality plaguing the country’s agricultural supply chain, arguing that outsized markups taken by middlemen are pushing small-scale and new farmers out of business at an alarming rate.
Richard Armstrong, founder of St Philip-based Armag Farms, which has specialized in yam and sweet potato production for over 40 years, laid out the crisis to delegates at the Ministry of Agriculture and Food and Nutritional Security’s *Looking Forward: Agriculture 2030* forum on Monday. He emphasized that the current distribution model leaves primary producers with far too small a share of the final retail price of their goods, eroding the economic viability of farming across the island.
“The full value of the food we grow never makes its way back to the farmer working the land,” Armstrong said. “Too much of the profit is siphoned off by intermediaries along the supply chain, while producers bear all the cost and risk.”
Armstrong noted that the problem is not unique to Barbados, but warned that without urgent intervention, the country will see a growing exodus of farmers, threatening domestic food security. To back his claim, he cited data from a Caribbean Development Bank study showing that only 20 percent of new farming operations survive past their first five years. He also pointed to his own business’s experience: Armag Farms previously expanded into agro-processing, but ultimately abandoned the segment after it became financially unviable, as processors demanded that farmers absorb extra costs to protect processor profits.
“Agro-processing, pack houses and all the infrastructure people talk about are necessary, but every step along the chain adds cost — and every new player wants their cut of the profit. That cut always comes out of the farmer’s share,” he explained. “For agro-processors to hit their profit targets, the farmer is the one left taking the loss.”
Armstrong also pushed back against the long-standing policy focus on keeping consumer retail prices low, which he says disproportionately shifts financial pressure onto producers. He shared a recent firsthand example to illustrate the scale of the markup gap: sweet potatoes that left his farm at a farmgate price of $2.62 per pound were later retailed to consumers for nearly $5 per pound, almost a 90 percent markup.
“Look at that markup. The middleman takes all that extra profit, and the farmer is the one left squeezed,” he said, adding that dozens of young new farmers have confided in him that low farmgate prices have put their entire agricultural careers at risk. “Young producers come to me all the time saying they can’t make a living. They sell their crops to a vendor for pennies on the dollar, then see that same vendor selling the produce in town for four, five, even six times the price they got paid.”
Senior Ministry of Agriculture officials have echoed Armstrong’s assessment, acknowledging that a significant imbalance exists between farmgate prices and final consumer costs. Sherlock King, the ministry’s Manager of Markets, confirmed that while not all vendors engage in excessive markup practices, the gap between what farmers earn and what consumers pay has reached “huge imbalances.”
Speaking to Barbados TODAY after the colloquium, King noted that vendors are fully entitled to earn a profit and cover legitimate overheads including transportation, storage and produce spoilage. But he added that vendors have a shared responsibility to balance their own earnings with accessibility of healthy food for consumers, and fair compensation for farmers.
King said the ministry is not pushing for strict government price controls, instead focusing on educational outreach to help vendors adopt pricing strategies that deliver fair returns for all stakeholders. “The idea is to help vendors understand that if they keep prices reasonable instead of chasing excessive short-term profits, they can move higher volumes of product,” he explained. “When that happens, everyone wins: consumers get affordable healthy food, vendors move more product and earn consistent returns, and farmers get a fairer price that lets them stay in business.”
King cited other examples of the extreme markup gap, noting that during tomato gluts, farmers sometimes sell produce for as little as 50 cents per pound at the farmgate, only for the same tomatoes to retail for $2.50 per pound to end consumers. The ministry’s intervention, King said, aims to correct this imbalance and build a more sustainable, equitable agricultural supply chain for Barbados.