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A paradoxical crisis has hit Barbados’s onion sector: after a successful government-backed push to expand domestic cultivation that delivered a strong harvest, hundreds of local farmers are now unable to offload their produce, according to warnings from the Barbados Agricultural Society (BAS).

James Paul, chief executive officer of the industry association, laid out the roots of the crisis during a press briefing. Over the past year, agricultural advocates successfully persuaded local growers to scale up onion planting, pushing total cultivated acreage past the 100-acre mark – a major milestone for the country’s goal of boosting food security and reducing reliance on imports. But this win has laid bare deep, long-unaddressed flaws in the sector’s marketing, distribution and infrastructure frameworks.

The most pressing issue, Paul explained, is the unregulated flow of imported onions that continues to saturate the local market exactly when domestic crops reach peak harvest. Competing against cheaper foreign shipments puts local producers, who already face far higher production costs than their international competitors, at an insurmountable disadvantage. Paul argued this misaligned policy undermines the very government efforts to expand domestic agriculture.

“I do not think it makes any logical sense to allow imports during windows where we know a large local harvest is incoming,” Paul said. “When we encourage farmers to invest in expanding production, we have a responsibility to plan ahead for how that produce will reach consumers. Right now, we are forcing growers to compete with imported goods on uneven ground, and that is unfair.”

Beyond misaligned import policy, gaps in post-harvest infrastructure and storage are compounding farmers’ struggles. Unlike imported onions, which are treated to withstand long-haul shipping, locally grown onions require carefully controlled, well-ventilated storage environments that protect the crop from pests and spoilage. Many of these specialized facilities have fallen into disrepair, Paul said, pointing to the shuttered historic drying plant in Foursquare, St. Philip as an example of the lost infrastructure the sector needs to restore or replace.

Fragmented coordination among individual farmers has also weakened the sector’s position, Paul added. Without collective organizing, small-scale growers lack collective bargaining power when negotiating with middlemen, and cannot deliver the consistent supply and pricing that major buyers require. This disorganization leaves individual producers vulnerable to exploitation, often forcing them to sell their crop below the cost of production just to clear inventory.

This dynamic threatens the long-term viability of domestic onion cultivation: if farmers cannot earn a reasonable return on their investment this season, Paul warned, few will be willing to expand planting in the coming year. Currently, just 20% of Barbados’s total onion demand is met by local production, but Paul said the country has the natural capacity to meet 100% of domestic demand if systemic flaws are addressed. With targeted improvements to storage, marketing and coordination, Paul estimated that total cultivated acreage could double to 200 acres within 12 months, creating a more resilient, self-sufficient domestic onion sector.

As intermittent rainfall threatens remaining unharvested crops, Paul has urged all local onion farmers to share real-time updates on their yields and harvest timelines with the BAS to enable better cross-sector market coordination. He also called for closer collaboration between private sector stakeholders and the state-owned Barbados Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation (BADMC) to fix gaps in the national onion value chain.

“Barbados has the ability to fully supply our own onion demand, we can do this,” Paul emphasized. “Right now, we are holding ourselves back from reaching our full potential by failing to put the right systems in place. We all have to work together to fix this – we cannot let farmers invest their time and money into a crop just to be left stuck with unsellable produce.”

Long-established market forces have cemented the United States dollar’s position as the undisputed global standard of value, and recent fluctuations in other major currencies will bring no meaningful economic shifts to Caribbean nations, according to a prominent former central banking leader from the region.

Dr Delisle Worrell, former governor of the Central Bank of Barbados and a veteran International Monetary Fund consultant, laid out this argument in the May issue of his regularly published Economic Letter, which carries the headline *The Dollar is the World’s Standard of Value*.

Worrell stressed that Caribbean economies are structured entirely around the US dollar for cross-border activity. Every key external transaction for the region—from pricing tourist packages to settling export and import trades, to securing foreign debt—uses the US dollar as the benchmark, and all clearing processes run through dollar-denominated accounts hosted by American commercial banks and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Against this backdrop, recent upward movements in the value of sterling, the Canadian dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen and the Chinese renminbi will not alter core economic conditions for Caribbean countries, he said.

The former governor, who also founded the Central Bank of Barbados’ research department, pointed out that the primary spillover harm from today’s global economic instability hitting Caribbean nations is imported inflation. He outlined a clear threshold for policy response: only countries where governments hold a fiscal surplus of revenue over current expenditure exceeding 2% of GDP have the capacity to roll out targeted subsidies to cap fuel and essential goods prices. For all other regional economies, there are few policy tools available to ease inflationary pressure, he added.

Worrell also issued a strong caution against one commonly proposed policy adjustment: revaluing domestic currencies to counteract inflation brought in from global markets. He explained that if a central bank drew down its foreign currency reserves to push the domestic exchange rate higher, market participants including commercial banks, import and export firms, and tourism operators would almost certainly hoard the cheapened US dollars instead of passing the exchange rate benefits through to consumers and other end users.

Global monetary data backs his broader claim about the dollar’s dominance: out of 180 legally recognized sovereign currencies across the world, the value of all 179 non-US currencies is defined relative to the dollar, Worrell noted. This status quo is not dependent on US government policy, shifts in the US or global economy, or price movements of gold, oil or other commodities, he said. It also has not been dislodged by the emergence of cryptocurrencies built on blockchain technology or any other fintech innovation. “All economic values are based on the dollar,” he concluded.

Worrell frames the dollar’s global benchmark status as a historical convention, comparable to the widespread adoption of Greenwich Mean Time as a global time standard. He traced the 80-year evolution of this arrangement: after World War II ended in 1945, the global economy split into two separate geopolitical and economic blocs, with the United States holding overwhelming sway over trade and finance in the Western democratic sphere. This established the dollar as the reference currency for all nations outside the Soviet-led bloc. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, the dollar’s use as a global reference spread to every corner of the world.

Crucially, Worrell emphasized that the dollar’s dominance emerged from organic market practice rather than top-down policy mandate from the United States or global institutions. Individual consumers, multinational companies and financial institutions across the world have consistently chosen the dollar as the go-to reference for settling cross-border transactions. He offered a common example: a consumer in Jamaica purchasing goods from Chinese suppliers will almost always first calculate the cost in US dollars before converting the total to Jamaican dollars for their final budgeting.

This entrenched market preference has outlasted every challenge to the dollar’s status, Worrell argued. Even as major economies including post-war Germany, Japan and most recently China rose to become the world’s second-largest economy, global markets have retained the dollar as the primary settlement currency. The dollar’s benchmark position also emerged unscathed from the 2007–2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent downgrading of market confidence in US government creditworthiness.

Today, despite growing uncertainty around the direction of US policy and the global economic volatility this unpredictability generates, there is no evidence of a broad global shift away from the dollar toward the euro, renminbi or any other alternative currency to serve as the universal standard of value, Worrell said.