According to a media report today Barbadians will be getting their eggs to fry, bake and make salads for the holidays after all. The Nation newspaper report has assured Barbadians that 324, 000 table eggs are enroute to Barbados from the United States of America. The fact that Barbados should be spending scare foreign exchange at this time of economic slowdown should raise a few eyebrows. The poultry industry must be aware by now what is the demand for eggs at Christmas time, and this should have guided their planning we would have thought. Benn is quoted in the press report that the importation of the eggs was done after the local producers were surveyed. So for the love of mike, why were they not surveyed back in September or October to provision for the perennial increased demand in December?
We see several points of query to this story.
We concede that the poultry planners could have gotten it wrong by not efficiently planning for the demand for eggs over the holidays. What has us puzzled is at a time we are preaching CSME, the shortfall could not have been supplied by our CARICOM neighbours. What does this say about the cohesion which exist in the region to cater to food security? Is the CARICOM Secretariat capable of responding to such a situation?
As stated above the bad planning by the poultry farmers and by extension the James Paul headed Barbados Agricultural Society (BAS) is now responsible for our hard earned foreign dollars being spent to buy eggs. As if that was not enough to show bad planning by the BAS, we understand from the report that Barbados will have to import tomatoes as well. Unfortunately the report neglected to inform us whether the tomatoes would be imported from the USA as well. We can hear the excuse that the unseasonal rain has caused this situation, unfortunately the shortage of eggs cannot be blamed on the rain, or can it?
In light of the government’s push to reduce the price of food it will be interesting to observe the price of the imported 324, 000 eggs to the Barbadian consumer. Here is an opportunity for the government to show leadership. Ordinarily a dozen eggs retail for about $6.80. We will see.
The blogmaster invites you to join the discussion.