Two months without selling a pound.
That is what someone farming sea moss in Eau Piquant has to explain at home. It is not that the harvest failed: the moss came up, it was cut, it was laid out to dry and there it still is, stored, waiting for someone to buy it. It used to sell every week. Now it piles up.
The price is what moved. The pound that used to fetch twenty-one or twenty-three dollars turns up offered at six. Whoever sold at the prices above puts it plainly: from a premium product to just another one.
And then the meetings begin. In the meetings a price floor is proposed: nobody sells below twenty dollars a pound, a single association negotiates, the price war ends. It is also proposed that the government finish mapping the coast and hand out cultivation plots under licence, so it is clear who may farm where.
Whoever proposes this chairs the association and also owns an export company. The one asking for the price floor has his own firm too. The compulsory export certificate already existed before the collapse became public.
There are some eight hundred producers on that coast. The map is still not done.
What follows is not the story of a superfood that cooled off. It is the story of who ends up inside the line when a coast gets divided.
Scene reconstructed from documented behaviour and territory; sources at the foot of the article.
The Signal
Nemrod Biscombe started promoting Saint Lucia's sea moss in 2017 as a premium product: US$21 to US$23 a pound. Today there are people selling at US$6. “From a premium product to just any product,” he told St. Lucia Times on 19 October 2025. Biscombe owns Seamoss Life Inc. His diagnosis: more suppliers came into a market with no rules, prices fell apart and quality went after them.
His solution is a fixed national price: a single association selling at US$20 a pound, so exporters stop undercutting each other. Kerwin Samuel, president of the Eau Piquant Sea Moss Farmers Association and owner of the exporter Total Health Foods Ltd., asks for something else: amend the laws so sea moss growers are included. Export Saint Lucia, the state export agency, has already done its part: since 1 October 2024, anyone exporting sea moss needs an export certificate. And the government has a project under way to map and regulate the coastal cultivation zones, which will assign farm areas, fishing areas and beach access; it is moving slowly, the growers say.
The remedy is being designed by the beneficiaries. The question is not what a pound is worth. It is who gets licensed when the coast is divided up.
The Context
The boom has already passed. Sea moss became a fashionable superfood during the pandemic — consumption tripled, according to Jerson Badal, then a programme manager at Export Saint Lucia — and Saint Lucia, with less than 1% of world production, built a story of quality on its volcanic waters. With the fever came theft: “during COVID we had a lot of people stealing sea moss from the farms,” Samuel says, and the measures they asked the government for have still not arrived.
Export value, according to the Department of Statistics, peaked in 2021 at 6.4 million dollars and then moved irregularly: 4.3 million in 2022, 5.2 in 2023 and 5.6 in 2024. Production went the other way: it peaked at 204.17 tonnes in 2021 and came down to 147.83 in 2023, 28% less. The two series cannot be set against each other: the tonnage is wet weight and the export figure is dried product — on the order of eight to ten kilos of wet moss per dry kilo — and sometimes carries added value, in gels, capsules and packaging. Neither one reads what the grower receives, and the export series ends in 2024, a year before the collapse to US$6, for which there is still no figure.
Buyer concentration is almost total: around 90% of the island's production goes to the United States, according to Sunita Daniel, executive director of Export Saint Lucia. And since 5 April 2025 there has been an additional 10% US tariff on goods from every country, Saint Lucia included. On top of that comes the sea: rising temperature and sargassum invasions brought yields down.
The Reading
The boring hypothesis wins, and the source states it itself: oversupply in a market with no rules. In the words of the report, more suppliers entered an unregulated market causing prices to plummet. Add the US tariff, the plateau of the wellness wave after lockdown, and a crop that yields less because of heat and sargassum. No villain is needed: four dated causes are enough.
The finding is somewhere else: not why the price fell, but what is being built with the fall as justification. The order of events is decisive. Mandatory certification did not arrive after the collapse: The Voice announced it on 19 September 2024 as a quality-standards story, without a word about prices and with a line from the agency itself that says exactly what it does: today anyone can export sea moss, and that is going to change. The barrier predates the crisis that now justifies it.
What is missing is naming who speaks. Biscombe asks for the US$20 floor and owns an exporter, Seamoss Life Inc. Samuel chairs the growers' association and owns another, Total Health Foods Ltd., and what he asks for — legal recognition, order on the coast — are barriers for the ones coming in. Lilian James, also an exporter, wants everything standardised, “from planting to export.” Badal, who ran programmes at the agency, holds that cooperatives fail out of mistrust and that the private sector does it better. In the source there is not a single grower without an export business: there is no neutral voice, and that is part of the report too. That the veterans believe the newcomers are less careful is the incumbents' frame.
Outside, a different story was told: Oceanographic portrayed Saint Lucia in the key of success and sustainability in July 2025. Nobody narrated the farm-gate collapse while it was happening.
The Pattern
When a superfood fever cools, the way out that gets proposed is almost never fewer barriers. It is formalisation: floor prices, certificates, licences, cadastres. And formalisation is written by whoever is already inside, with the argument that the newcomers work badly.
The coastal mapping is the exact moment a fashion wave turns into property. Before the boom, the coast belonged to whoever worked it. After the boom, it will belong to whoever holds the assigned area. That piece of paperwork is not announced as a division of spoils but as order, traceability and export quality, and all three words are true.
That same report recorded hundreds of sea moss farms across the Caribbean, more than a third of them run by women. In Saint Lucia the sector gathers some 800 producers, nearly half of them women. There the question of who receives an area is not administrative. The price recovers or it does not; an assigned coastal area lasts a great deal longer than a fashion cycle.
The sources this piece already cited, gathered and checked. Open to verify.
- St. Lucia Times. "Farmers, Exporters Warn of Trouble Beneath Saint Lucia's Sea Moss Boom." October 19, 2025. Farm-gate price, export value and production series, sector size
- Export Saint Lucia. "Sea Moss Export Certificate — Saint Lucia." Mandatory for every exporter since October 1, 2024
- The Voice (Saint Lucia). "Seamoss Production to Be Regulated." September 19, 2024. Announcement of the certification as a quality-standards measure
- Caribbean Trade Law and Development. "US 'Liberation Day' Tariffs: What Impact for the Caribbean?" April 4, 2025. Additional 10% tariff in force from April 5, 2025
- Oceanographic Magazine. "Sea Moss: Sustainably Growing the Future of Saint Lucia." July 2025. Caribbean farm count and share run by women