The Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute, working through its St Vincent and the Grenadines tissue-culture laboratory, has delivered two new high-yield dasheen cultivars to the Barbados Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation — IND512, a red petiole variety yielding four to eight pounds per plant, and Samoana, a green petiole producing five to ten pounds. Both varieties reach harvest in seven to nine months.
The numbers matter for a regional target most Caribbean ministries acknowledge they are not on track to meet. CARICOM’s 25%-cut-in-food-imports goal by 2030 has been the public framing since 2022. Root crops are one of the categories where domestic production can plausibly displace imports if yield, climate adaptation and farmer uptake all align. CARDI’s country representative Christina Pooler confirmed the new cultivars have already been trialled in several islands and have shown both yield improvement and climate adaptation suited to Caribbean conditions.
BADMC’s deputy CEO Dr Claire Durant was candid about the demand-side challenge: “Dasheen is not a very popular item in Barbados.” That admission frames the second part of the food-security equation — supply-side improvement only translates to import substitution if the local market actually shifts purchasing toward the domestically grown crop. Without that demand pull, the high-yield cultivars produce surplus that either goes to export, to processing, or to waste.
Chief Agricultural Officer Paul Lucas described the timing as “critical” — code, in the Caribbean agricultural sector, for the recognition that food-system shocks from climate, hurricane, and global supply chain pressures have made the 2030 target less aspirational and more existential. For diaspora Barbadians watching the country position itself for the post-Hurricane Beryl, post-pandemic, post-Russia-Ukraine global food economy, the dasheen rollout is a small but technically grounded data point.
The next twelve months will show how many BADMC-supplied farmers actually plant the new varieties, what yields they achieve under Barbadian field conditions, and whether the produce makes it to retail at prices competitive with imported alternatives. Each of those questions is answerable.