Barbados’ top agricultural industry advocacy group has renewed its lobbying push for government intervention to rein in meat imports, warning that an unprecedented surplus of locally produced pork and poultry has filled national cold storage facilities to capacity and pushed hundreds of domestic farmers to the brink of crippling financial hardship. \n\nJames Paul, chief executive of the Barbados Agricultural Society (BAS), told reporters that domestic meat producers are operating under unsustainable pressure, as overstocked cold storage leaves nowhere for farmers to house their finished products amid a supply-demand mismatch spurred by unregulated cheap foreign imports. To resolve the growing crisis, Paul is calling on the Barbadian government to launch a full review of existing trade regulations, close loopholes that allow under-taxed imported meat to enter the market, and implement temporary restrictions or a full suspension of competing foreign meat imports. This pause, he argues, would give the domestic market enough time to absorb the current surplus of local product before it leads to widespread farm failures.\n\nPaul emphasized that the large capital investments local farmers made over recent years to expand production capacity and boost operational efficiency are now at risk of being completely wiped out by the flood of cheap imported meat entering the country through unclosed regulatory gaps. The domestic pork sector, he said, has suffered the most severe damage from unfair foreign competition, with impacts rippling through major buyers and processing facilities across the entire island. \n\nMany imported pork products enter the country at reduced duty rates through regulatory loopholes, Paul explained, putting local producers at an impossible price disadvantage that locks them out of key market segments. HIPAC, one of the largest institutional purchasers of local pork in Barbados, has been forced to drastically cut the volume of local pork it buys due to intense underpriced competition from imported alternatives, he noted.\n\nThis drop in domestic purchasing comes at a time when local pig farmers deliberately expanded their herds and upgraded production facilities to meet projected domestic demand, leaving thousands of farmers stuck with unsellable excess stock and creating a fast-escalating crisis for the entire livestock industry, Paul said. The poultry sub-sector faces an equally urgent scenario, he added, with cold storage infrastructure stretched far beyond its designed limits. Both large commercial poultry operations and small independent producers are currently sitting on record high inventory levels, creating crippling operational bottlenecks that slow work at hatcheries and processing facilities across the country.\n\n“We do recognise that we have a glut of poultry on our hands. We have been talking constantly, and we know that the cold storage down there is full to the brim. Also, for some of the larger producers, the stocks are up, and then of course a lot of our smaller producers are coming on at the same time,” Paul said. He added that just one week prior, at least one major processing facility was unable to process and distribute all scheduled birds for market, offering clear proof of how severe the current backlog has become.\n\nPaul argued that Barbados’ domestic agriculture sector has reached a level of maturity where local producers can fully meet the island’s entire demand for fresh meat without relying on foreign suppliers. “We are reaching the stage where our local poultry industry should be able to satisfy 100 per cent of the demand for fresh poultry; we do not need to import anything. There is no reason for us to be going shopping abroad to whatever Caribbean destination people feel like going to or in the United States to find these products when we have them here. We need more than talk in the industry right now — we need action,” he said.\n\nFailure to act on the import imbalance, Paul warned, puts both private farmer investments and public government funding at serious risk. Many local producers took out loans through a $2 million government-backed investment program administered by the BAS to upgrade their farm facilities, and unregulated imports will make it impossible for many of these farmers to make their loan payments, he said. The BAS will continue supporting farmers through the application process with the Ministry of Agriculture to help boost farm resilience, Paul said, while continuing to push for urgent, decisive policy action to restrict imports and resolve the current glut.