US Market
The Jamaican castor oil industry has not been able to shed the perception of being an enterprise for the ‘small man’, largely because the potential earnings mainly flow to counterfeit products on the market that are falsely labelled as Jamaican, players in the sector say.
Local producers of what is called Jamaican black castor oil, or JBCO, say the inauthentic castor oil is mostly produced in India and China, then labelled as Jamaican and sold for a fraction of the price.
For instance, an article posted by the Mona Institute of Applied Sciences, MIAS, on its website, says the global market for JBCO is US$300 million, but that Jamaica’s share is less than US$5 million.
Dr Howard Reid, principal investigator and director of MIAS, at the University of the West Indies, said this week that the proliferation of inauthentic JBCO products is due to a lack of standards.
“Jamaica has not told the world what JBCO is, and JBCO is not protected globally,” Reid said.