There is lit­tle doubt that chick­en re­mains this coun­try's favourite form of pro­tein and that the ap­peal of poul­try cuts across the coun­try's class, race, re­li­gious, gen­der and age dif­fer­ences.

A re­port in this news­pa­per in De­cem­ber 2011 in­di­cat­ed that the lo­cal poul­try in­dus­try pro­duced, on an an­nu­al ba­sis, about 48 mil­lion broil­ers, which is equal to about 92 mil­lion kilo­grammes of live weight. That amounts to per capi­ta con­sump­tion of chick­en of 144.5 pounds, which placed T&T among the top con­sumers of the com­mod­i­ty in the world.

On Wednes­day, the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture and Fish­eries is­sued a news re­lease in which it said it was aware of con­cerns be­ing ex­pressed in the pub­lic do­main re­gard­ing the avail­abil­i­ty of chick­en. The min­istry, how­ev­er, as­sured the pub­lic that Gov­ern­ment was close­ly mon­i­tor­ing the sit­u­a­tion and en­gag­ing with stake­hold­ers across the poul­try sec­tor.

"The cur­rent tight­en­ing of poul­try sup­ply is be­ing in­flu­enced by a com­bi­na­tion of fac­tors, rather than by a fun­da­men­tal short­age of pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty," said the min­istry, adding that it had been ad­vised that chick­en re­mains avail­able to con­sumers, "al­though some con­sumers may ex­pe­ri­ence tem­po­rary dif­fi­cul­ty ob­tain­ing their usu­al quan­ti­ties at par­tic­u­lar re­tail out­lets."

Giv­en the pop­u­lar­i­ty of chick­en, the short­ages be­ing ex­pe­ri­enced by con­sumers across the coun­try are like­ly to hit house­holds hard. That is be­cause when a com­mod­i­ty is in short sup­ply, there is a nat­ur­al ten­den­cy for its price to rise. Re­port­ing by this me­dia house yes­ter­day in­di­cat­ed that the price of chick­en in some parts of south Trinidad had in­creased by 50 per cent.

The June 2026 in­fla­tion re­port from the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice not­ed that the in­dex for food and non-al­co­holic bev­er­ages had in­creased by 1.4 per cent be­tween May and June this year. Con­tribut­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly to that in­crease, ac­cord­ing to the CSO, was the gen­er­al up­ward move­ment in the prices of sev­er­al items, in­clud­ing fresh whole chick­en, oth­er chilled or frozen chick­en and frozen whole chick­en.

As a re­sult of the culi­nary choic­es in­volv­ing chick­en in many house­holds in T&T, the Con­sumer Af­fairs Di­vi­sion of the Min­istry of Trade, In­vest­ment and Tourism has been col­lect­ing, on a month­ly ba­sis, live poul­try price da­ta from a sam­ple of poul­try de­pots through­out Trinidad. The aim of the da­ta-col­lec­tion ex­er­cise, which start­ed in Sep­tem­ber 2017, is to en­sure fair pric­ing in the mar­ket­place.

In Jan­u­ary, 2026, the av­er­age live weight price of chick­en at a poul­try de­pot in Trinidad was $8.47 per pound. When the av­er­age price to pluck and gut a chick­en is in­clud­ed, the fi­nal dressed weight price of a six-pound chick­en was $13.74 per pound. That was in Jan­u­ary.

By June, the av­er­age live weight price of chick­en had in­creased from $8.47 to $9.25 per pound, an in­crease of 9.20 per cent in six months. And the av­er­age fi­nal dressed weight price of the six-pound chick­en went from $13.74 to $14.77, an in­crease of 7.5 per cent.

The Gov­ern­ment needs to move quick­ly to en­sure that there is no price goug­ing in this im­por­tant as­pect of the food mar­ket. It would be in­tol­er­a­ble for un­scrupu­lous busi­ness­peo­ple to at­tempt to take ad­van­tage of what the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture says is a tem­po­rary sup­ply is­sue, by in­creas­ing the com­mod­i­ty to un­af­ford­able lev­els.

Con­sumers al­so need to be sen­si­ble and ex­plore oth­er sources of pro­tein, in­clud­ing the wide range of peas and beans that are avail­able in T&T, un­til there is nor­mal­i­sa­tion in the chick­en mar­ket.