The Tribune

By ANNELIA NIXON

Tribune Business Reporter

anixon@tribunemedia.net

Gas station operators yesterday confirmed the elimination of VAT on unprepared foods will apply to their convenience store operations as they called for The Bahamas to produce more of what it consumes.

Bernard ‘Porky’ Dorsett, operator of Porky’s Rubis Service Station on East Street, said that despite the VAT elimination from April 1, 2026, the price of food is still high. “It ain’t about the VAT,” he added. “The VAT don’t take their grocery bill to $400. Food prices are just so high.

“If an American is complaining about the food price, we got to import everything we eat in this country. So if the Americans are crying about how high food [prices] is, we have nothing else but to complain because we import everything.”

Peter Roker, principal of Roker’s Gas Station, said he is “deathly afraid of food insecurity” and added that, while his convenience store may see more shoppers with the removal of VAT, the overall price of food items will still remain too high. He said prices will only continue to go up and Bahamians need to begin producing and farming more of their own food.

“We as a people, OK, ought to be growing individually more of our food,” Mr Roker said. “We don't have any control on the cost of food that we have to import. The merchants, the food store merchants, in this country, are doing an excellent job. And this is an extremely competitive market. But the truth of the matter is that we can go right now in this cold weather, we can grow tomatoes, all of the cucumber, the celery, the lettuce.

“I mean, we have gotten too lazy. So, no, we're not going to be able to get food prices down unless it goes down worldwide. It will not come down, only go up. If you have more people growing their own food, you may have less food stores, but you're not going to be able to get the existing food stores to go down because they're all working on an edge.

“What I'm deathly afraid of is food insecurity. If you see today, tomorrow, there's a problem in the shipping lanes, especially with all the uncertainty in the world today, we will be up that proverbial creek. We need to get off our behinds and begin to farm more individually

“I'm not saying go out there and start no big farm. I am saying go out there and have your own garden. And instead of government giving acres and acres of property to people, it should be giving land to people... so we can grow our own food and also to that, in my opinion, every yard in this country should perhaps be growing food.”

Mr Dorsett, meanwhile, said the Government “has talked about agriculture for years” but not delivered.  He added: “Government has talked about agriculture for years. I at one time owned Porky’s Farm in Abaco, where I had over 6,000 hogs. I had over 600 angus cows. And 2012, I approached the Government about building a processing plant to process all this meat that I was producing, and to this day I've not got nothing from them. I shut the farm down. In 2013-2014, I shut the farm down. I ran the farm from 1999. I bought the farm in 1999. 

“When the Christie government came to power in 2012, I sent a letter requesting permission to build a processing plant. I went out and raised the $12m to build a plant. The third key operation was to train the workers and set up the plant. Ain't nothing happened yet. All these governments continue to talk. 

“When this Government got into power, they talk about the Golden Yolk. Well, have we heard anything about the Golden Yolk any more? Remember, they came to power with all this talk about they going to produce egg. They are now into their fifth year. Have you heard anything recently about the Golden Yolk? Ain't no Golden Yolk happen yet.”