Black soldier flies eat food waste and produce animal feed. The Caribbean is building farms to do both at scale.

The region imports between US$40 million and US$50 million of compound animal feed every year. An insect already living in Caribbean ecosystems can convert organic waste into a local substitute, and two operations, in Trinidad and Tobago and in Grenada, are building the infrastructure to prove it.

Caribbean Science & Innovation | Innovation Report

When the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations began planning a black soldier fly project for the Caribbean in the early 2020s, the initial proposal for sourcing larvae was straightforward: import a colony from the United Kingdom. Rakesh Bhukal, a recent Environmental and Natural Resource Management graduate from the University of the West Indies, had a different view. Why bring in foreign flies, he asked the project team, when local populations were already adapted to the Caribbean climate? The team agreed. Bhukal went out into the field, dug around rotting breadfruit, set bait traps in chicken farms, and sifted through what he describes as "thousands of maggots" to find the species he needed.

That decision, locally sourced larvae over imported stock, turned out to matter more than it first appeared. Imported flies carried two significant risks: the possibility of becoming an invasive species, and no guarantee they would thrive in Trinidad's humidity and heat. Local populations carried neither risk. They were already there, already adapted, already doing what the project needed them to do. Bhukal's task was to domesticate them.

With a dedicated facility still under renovation, he converted a spare room in his rented apartment into a makeshift insect bioreactor. By the time the proper facility at UWI's St. Augustine Campus opened, Bhukal had almost single-handedly developed the production methodology it would run on. The insect he was working with, Hermetia illucens, the black soldier fly, is now the centre of a four-country FAO programme targeting one of the Caribbean's most persistent agricultural problems: the cost of feeding livestock.

As Bhukal himself puts it, "Don't let the word 'maggot' scare you. Once you see what these flies can do, you'll realise they're not pests. They are partners."

Feed costs and the import dependency that drives them

Livestock farming across the Caribbean operates under a structural constraint that has no easy workaround. Feed, the single largest input in poultry, pig, and aquaculture production, typically accounts for up to 70% of total production costs. The region does not produce enough of the ingredients, primarily soybean cake and fishmeal, to meet its own needs, and so imports them. Between US$40 million and US$50 million in compound animal feed enters the Caribbean annually from external markets.

Trinidad and Tobago illustrates the scale of that dependency in concrete terms. The country consumes more than 1.3 million kilograms of chicken every week. Producing that quantity of chicken requires approximately 6.8 million kilograms of feed, the majority of which is imported. The price volatility of global commodity markets, soy prices, shipping costs, geopolitical disruptions, flows directly into the margins of Caribbean livestock farmers with limited ability to absorb it.

Dr Renata Clarke, FAO Sub-regional Coordinator for the Caribbean, put the problem plainly at the project's 2023 launch: agriculture cannot be transformed if the cost of critical inputs like feed and fertiliser remains high and largely imported. The insect farming project was designed as a direct response to that constraint. It does not attempt to reform global commodity markets. It attempts to make them less relevant.

CARICOM member states have set a target of reducing the region's food import bill by 25% by 2025, with particular focus on increasing local livestock production. Insect-derived feed is one of the few interventions that addresses the cost of that production at its source rather than at the margins.

What black soldier fly larvae actually do

The black soldier fly's larval stage is the economically significant part of its life cycle. Given a substrate of organic waste, larvae consume it rapidly and convert it into two outputs: their own bodies, which are high in protein and fat and can be dried and processed into animal feed meal, and frass, the solid residue of their feeding, which is rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium and functions as an organic soil fertiliser.

The conversion happens quickly. Under suitable conditions, larvae can process organic waste and reach harvest weight within days. The waste inputs are those already generated by the Caribbean food system: fruit and vegetable scraps from markets and processing facilities, agricultural residues, food industry offcuts. Green Feeds Ltd, the Grenada-based company building a commercial-scale operation around the technology, estimates that up to 95% of biowaste fed to the larvae can be converted into these outputs.

The protein content of the resulting meal is comparable to soybean cake and fishmeal, the two ingredients it is intended to replace. FAO has reviewed the global research base on BSF larvae as feed and confirmed that the species can be reared reliably in tropical climates and meets the nutritional requirements of poultry and aquaculture feed. Insect meal has now been approved as a feed ingredient in several major markets, including the European Union for poultry and pig feed, which opens export possibilities alongside domestic use.

Frass fertiliser carries an additional benefit. It contains chitin, the compound found in insect exoskeletons, which when present in soil stimulates plants' natural defence mechanisms against pests and fungal infection. Unlike synthetic fertilisers, it enhances microbial soil activity rather than suppressing it. For Caribbean smallholder farmers combining livestock and crop production, a single BSF operation can reduce input costs on two fronts simultaneously.

From apartment to regional hub: the Trinidad project

The FAO programme operates across four Caribbean countries, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Grenada, and Jamaica, with the UWI St. Augustine facility in Trinidad serving as the central research and production hub. Dr Ronald Roopnarine, researcher and lecturer at UWI's Faculty of Food and Agriculture, has led the organisation and logistics for UWI's role in the project, framing it explicitly within the post-pandemic reassessment of Caribbean food security. The disruptions of 2020 and 2021 made the structural dependence on imported agricultural inputs visible in ways that were difficult to dismiss, and pushed the case for local alternatives from theoretical to urgent.

Bhukal's contribution to that facility has been foundational. Having established a working larval colony before the dedicated space was ready, he developed the egg harvesting protocols, the feeding regimes, and the growth monitoring methodology that now underpin the bioreactor's operation. FAO's vision is that by 2026 the facility functions as a regional knowledge exchange centre, training farmers, feed company staff, and entrepreneurs from across the Caribbean in BSF production and primary processing.

FAO's own modelling suggests the potential scale is significant. Using 50% of the organic waste currently available in the Caribbean could produce sufficient insect meal to replace 50 to 100% of the broiler feed currently imported by the region. That figure rests on waste availability estimates rather than confirmed production data, as the industry is not yet at that scale anywhere in the Caribbean, but it frames the upper boundary of what the technology makes possible if it reaches commercial maturity.

The four-country scope also creates the possibility of a regional supply network. The UWI facility produces larvae for Barbados, Grenada, and Jamaica during the initial phase while country-level operations develop. As each national pilot matures, FAO anticipates that farmers, feed companies, and governments will adopt BSF as a standard component of more sustainable national food systems rather than as a research curiosity.

Green Feeds and the commercial model in Grenada

Green Feeds Ltd takes the same biological process and wraps it in a fully integrated commercial structure. Founded by Frank Cawkwell, whose background spans engineering, green energy, and supply chain management for UN operations across the Caribbean, the company is based in Grenada and designed from the outset to function at commercial rather than pilot scale.

The BSF operation is one component of a closed-loop system that also includes drying and hydrolysis processing, which eliminates pathogens from organic inputs and increases the protein digestibility of the larval meal, biodiesel production from waste lipids, and renewable energy generation to power the operation off-grid. The integration closes the waste loop completely: organic material enters the system, is converted by larvae into protein meal and frass, and the energy and processing costs of running the facility are offset by fuel and electricity generated from the same biological process.

Green Feeds positions the cost reduction for local farmers as its primary market argument. A Grenadian poultry or aquaculture farmer currently buying imported soybean-based feed at international commodity prices faces the same margin squeeze as farmers across the region. Locally produced insect meal, derived from waste that would otherwise reach landfill or be burned, removes the import cost from the equation and replaces it with a locally priced input. The frass fertiliser creates a second revenue stream alongside the feed product.

The company also commits to carbon neutrality in its operations, which opens a potential third revenue stream if voluntary carbon markets develop frameworks for crediting biological waste conversion at the farm level. This possibility follows the logic already being applied to other Caribbean circular economy projects, including sargassum biofertiliser production in Barbados.

Cawkwell's background in UN supply chain logistics across 22 Caribbean states gives Green Feeds a practical understanding of the distribution and logistics constraints that have historically made locally produced agricultural inputs difficult to scale. The company's planned Green Tech Innovation Park in Grenada is designed to consolidate multiple sustainable technology operations on a single site, reducing per-unit logistics costs and creating a demonstration facility for the regional model.

That integration also resolves one of the practical objections to small-island BSF operations: energy cost. Running drying and hydrolysis equipment at any meaningful throughput requires a reliable power supply, and electricity in the Caribbean is among the most expensive in the world. Generating that power from biodiesel produced within the same waste conversion process removes it from the operating cost calculation entirely, which changes the economics of local insect meal production relative to imported alternatives more substantially than the feed price differential alone would suggest.

What the Caribbean feed bill looks like if the industry reaches scale

The economics of insect farming as a feed input depend on three variables that are not yet fully resolved in the Caribbean context: the cost of waste feedstock collection and sorting, the capital cost of bioreactor infrastructure, and the market price at which insect meal can be sold relative to soy. In more mature insect farming markets, including the Netherlands, China, and South Africa, industrial-scale production has brought costs down to the point where BSF meal is competitive with conventional protein inputs for specific feed applications. The Caribbean is not there yet, but both the FAO programme and Green Feeds are building the data that will determine whether the regional cost structure can follow the same trajectory.

Insect production has also been identified by FAO as a livelihood opportunity for women, youth, and groups who lack access to conventional agricultural land but can operate small-scale BSF units using household organic waste as feedstock. Business case development for small-scale entrepreneurs is part of the FAO programme brief, and access to finance for those entrepreneurs, through development banks and agricultural credit schemes, is a condition the project is working to establish alongside the technical components.

Damian Malins, Venturing Projects Director at Fera Science Ltd and a project partner on the FAO programme, has described insect protein as having "enormous potential" to respond to food security and sustainability challenges as a high-quality, safely sourced ingredient capable of displacing soy and fishmeal when blended into animal diets. Fera, a specialist in insect farming, food safety, and novel protein production with over a century of scientific services experience, brings that expertise to the Caribbean partnership.

FAO set 2026 as the year insect farming becomes a viable industry in the Caribbean. In Grenada, Green Feeds is already building the infrastructure intended to meet that timeline. In Trinidad, the bioreactor Bhukal assembled in a rented apartment, from locally caught flies, because importing them from Britain made less sense than finding the ones already living here, is now the research centre for a four-country programme. Both arrived at the same answer through different routes, which is perhaps the more durable basis for an industry than any single project or pilot.