Against a backdrop of long-standing misalignment between Barbados’ agricultural producers and its tourism-driven hospitality industry, the Barbados Hotel and Tourism Association (BHTA) has launched a groundbreaking new initiative: the Bajan Harvest Hub. Designed to directly connect local farmers with hotel and restaurant buyers, the hub targets systemic gaps in the island’s domestic supply chain, with the dual goals of cutting reliance on imported food and expanding economic benefits for Barbadian workers and businesses across both sectors.
After two years of collaborative development to resolve the long-standing disconnect between production and demand, the initiative fills a critical information gap that has hampered cross-sector cooperation for decades. As BHTA Operations Manager Greg Broomes explained, farmers have long lacked clear insight into what quantities and types of produce the tourism sector needs, and when, while hospitality buyers have struggled to track what fresh goods are available locally throughout the growing season. The hub brings farmers, commercial packaging facilities, and hospitality enterprises into a single coordinated network to align production with demand.
The core objectives of the Bajan Harvest Hub extend far beyond basic supply chain coordination. At its heart, the initiative seeks to boost the share of local produce used in Barbados tourism, keep more tourism-generated revenue within the national economy, and improve the livelihoods of thousands of workers who depend on both agriculture and tourism for income. Broomes acknowledged that ongoing challenges, including inconsistent harvests, quality variability, price volatility, and the growing threat of climate-related shocks to agricultural production, remain significant obstacles. But the hub is structured to directly address these issues by giving farmers advance clarity on market demand, allowing them to plan planting schedules more effectively and giving them the financial security to invest in climate-resilient agricultural technologies. For hospitality partners, the model delivers the key benefit of a predictable, steady supply of fresh local produce.
Participation in the initiative has already grown rapidly since its early planning stages. What began with 11 founding hospitality enterprises has now expanded to 17, with multiple additional businesses currently completing onboarding to join the network. To enable accurate production planning, all participating hospitality operations are required to share 12 months of historical purchasing data, giving farmers full transparency into the sector’s ongoing needs. Two leading local agricultural institutions—the Barbados Agricultural Society and the Barbados Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation—are serving as official packaging partners, supporting the aggregation, quality grading, packaging, and distribution of produce from small-scale producers to participating hospitality businesses.
BHTA Chief Executive Officer Senator Ryan Forde framed the launch of the hub as a landmark milestone after years of conversations about strengthening ties between the agriculture and tourism sectors. Forde noted that the BHTA had previously faced criticism for a perceived lack of tangible support for cross-sector integration, and the Bajan Harvest Hub was developed to respond to that critique with data-driven, practical action rather than rhetoric. “Where is the data to support your arguments? If you have data, what are the proposals, the next steps to improve the situation?” Forde said, referencing the guiding questions that shaped the project’s design. Unlike earlier failed attempts to link the two sectors, the hub leverages lessons from past initiatives to build a more functional, scalable model. “We will do it again, and we will learn from where you left it, and we will improve it together,” he said.
Forde added that the project aligns with a broader national strategy to diversify Barbados’ tourism offering and ensure that a larger share of tourism revenue flows to local residents and domestic businesses. He pointed to a parallel shift already underway in Barbados’ culinary sector: the national culinary team has increasingly incorporated local ingredients into competition menus and everyday restaurant and bar operations since the COVID-19 pandemic, setting a precedent for wider adoption of domestic produce across the hospitality industry.
Broomes emphasized that the benefits of the hub will extend beyond agriculture and tourism to all Barbadian consumers and workers. A stronger domestic supply chain will create new local employment opportunities, keep more visitor spending circulating within the national economy, and ultimately lower costs for end consumers. He also noted that the collaborative model tested through the Bajan Harvest Hub is not limited to agricultural produce, and could be adapted for use in other domestic sectors and even replicated in other island economies facing similar import dependence challenges.
The initiative builds on earlier successful cross-sector projects, including the Chefs for Development program, which first demonstrated how local produce could be integrated into high-quality hospitality menus. The official launch event brought together a broad coalition of stakeholders, including tourism and agriculture industry representatives, government officials, funding agency partners, smallholder farmers, and hospitality leaders. Tourism Liaison Officer Sade Dean summed up the mood at the launch, calling the project “the beginning of a transformative journey, for tourism and agriculture in Barbados.”