GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

Pork pres­sure.

This is how some lo­cal im­porters and dis­trib­u­tors have de­scribed the de­ci­sion by Smith­field Foods to idle its Sioux Falls, South Dako­ta, pork-pro­cess­ing fa­cil­i­ty.

Smith­field Foods is the world’s largest pork pro­duc­er and is shut­ter­ing its US plant in­def­i­nite­ly af­ter a coro­n­avirus out­break among em­ploy­ees.

The com­pa­ny has al­so warned that clo­sures across the coun­try are tak­ing Amer­i­can meat sup­plies “per­ilous­ly close to the edge” of short­falls.

Since this coun­try is a ma­jor im­porter of var­i­ous meats in­clud­ing pork, this can lead to a short­age on the lo­cal mar­ket.

CEO of ADM Dis­trib­u­tors, Bal­li­ram Ma­haraj ex­plained that gi­ants like Smith­field Foods will now have to sus­tain their own mar­kets first be­fore it can sell to oth­er coun­tries.

“There is go­ing to be a se­ri­ous short­age of a lot of de­mand items in­clud­ing im­port­ed meats like pork and im­port­ed pork prod­ucts apart from the prob­lem of pan­ic buy­ing,” Ma­haraj said.

He said all busi­ness­es op­er­ate with a “stock and or­der” sys­tem en­abling sup­pli­ers to work with a prop­er plan for fu­ture stocks which can car­ry through even up to the end of the year.

“We main­tain a cer­tain quan­ti­ty or a float be­cause we don’t want to over­stock or un­der­stock. The main sup­pli­ers we or­der from al­so use the same sys­tem be­cause they don’t want to end up with 1,000 pieces of pork sides for in­stance and there is no mar­ket for it.

“And the buy­ing pat­terns in Trinidad has changed so that the float for this month has been sold out. We now have to wait about 90 days for it to neu­tralise if it can in fact do so be­cause sup­pli­ers have com­mit­ments to their re­spec­tive mar­kets first,” Ma­haraj said.

He said this means that im­port­ed pork and oth­er meat prod­ucts may not be avail­able on the lo­cal mar­ket for a while.

An­oth­er im­porter who op­er­ates a gourmet shop but did not want to be iden­ti­fied said lux­u­ry items on the whole were be­com­ing hard­er and hard­er to source.

He said since the on­set of COVID-19 that par­tic­u­lar mar­ket has not been very lu­cra­tive.

“We are bare­ly mak­ing it to pay rent, salaries and now our range of im­ports are di­min­ish­ing.

“Smith­field Foods is one of our ma­jor largest sup­pli­ers and with op­tions shrink­ing glob­al­ly we may not even have a busi­ness in the com­ing months. Things are very grim for us right now,” he added.