Quality Poultry Takes Lick Due to Stevedores Strike

As we have reported, the strike has implications with goods coming into and going out of Belize for the Christmas season. Caught in all this, is the importation of turkey which as you know Belizeans will want on the dinner table for the holidays. On Monday a cargo vessel, the Caribe Navigator, sailed away with a shipment because striking stevedores would not unload. To complicate matters, local farmers cut down production earlier this year due to the avian flu.  Quality Poultry Products, which is the main distributor of turkey locally, explains developments in the importation of the bird.

Raymond Barkman

On the Phone: Raymond Barkman, General Manager, Quality Poultry Products

“We have been self-sufficient with turkey and we had a good turkey going here, but the influenza in this year January, it was a big loss for a lot of farmers because it affected their birds. Now, the turkey farmer has even a bigger investment that anyone else because he gets to grow the turkey from small to thirty pounds. So he has a significant amount of money in it before he gets anything back. From one flock of turkeys for example, he has three hundred and fifty thousand dollars of expenses before he receives any money. So he called and said I can’t take the risk, I am scared because of the AI. We’ve never had any issues of turkeys having the AI, but I can’t afford to take the risk. So the Ministry okayed it and decided that this year we will be importing turkey. Hats off to them because they said no problem and they supported us with no problem. The ministry, the C.E.O….from there we had complications because the Butterball Company were creating a lot of problems with shipping turkey…only to come to Belize only to be stopped and all the birds taken away. So that’s the history for the turkey this year in a short blimp.  Obviously now we are just hoping and praying that they will be able to offload those ships.”