Caribbean Food Security, One Year After The Collapse Of USAID

In 2024 an eggplant farmer in Suriname made a wager on the future.

Encouraged by a USAID-funded agricultural program, he borrowed money to dig a well, clear land, and prepare new fields. Project advisers had urged him to diversify into ginger and adopt climate-smart farming techniques. The promised support, he believed, would help transform a struggling smallholding into a viable business.

The support never arrived.

Within months of returning to office in 2025, President Donald Trump effectively dismantled USAID, bringing a sudden end to an agency that had spent more than six decades distributing over $40 billion a year in American foreign assistance.

The program supporting that Surinamese farmer was among the thousands of projects abruptly terminated, leaving him with debt, unfinished investments, and no access to the market linkages he had been promised.

“He was left financially ruined and emotionally battered, and his taste for agriculture became a bitter one,” recalls Sandiford Edwards, who directed the Caribbean Agricultural Productivity Improvement Activity (CAPA), the USAID-funded project that had been working with him.

Disillusioned and unable to recover from the setback, the farmer abandoned agriculture altogether.

His experience was not isolated. Across the Caribbean, similar accounts offer a glimpse into the human cost of dismantling the agency.

More than a year later, the region is still grappling with the consequences. Many of the programs that helped strengthen regional agriculture, build resilience to climate shocks, and create economic opportunities have either vanished or been left severely underfunded.

Heightened Vulnerability

For Small Island Developing States in the Caribbean, reductions in Official Development Assistance can have disproportionate consequences for food security and economic resilience.

The region’s food system is already highly exposed to external shocks. Most countries import between 60% and 90% of the food they consume, while limited agricultural land, recurring hurricanes, and other extreme weather events restrict domestic production.

As one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, the Caribbean also faces rising temperatures, stronger storms, prolonged droughts, and coastal flooding, all of which threaten food supplies and rural livelihoods.

Food security is not simply a question of food availability. It is also a function of access. Poverty, unemployment, and low incomes can leave households unable to afford nutritious food even when supplies are available. The World Food Programme estimates that around 3.2 million people across the English- and Dutch-speaking Caribbean—roughly 42% of the population—are food insecure.

For decades, USAID helped mitigate some of those vulnerabilities. Its funding supported farmer training, climate resilience, biodiversity protection, water infrastructure, disaster preparedness, and broader efforts to strengthen food security and livelihoods across the region.

Sizable investment

At a CARICOM summit in Guyana in 2024, the United States announced more than $43 million in USAID funding for climate and biodiversity initiatives across the region.

The package included investments in coastal protection, climate finance, resilience-building programs, and other efforts aimed at helping countries adapt to increasingly severe weather events—support that also strengthened the foundations of the region’s agricultural sector.

The announcement formed part of a much broader U.S. commitment to the region. In 2024, the Biden administration requested nearly $2.5 billion in assistance for Latin America and the Caribbean and a further $2.2 billion for fiscal year 2025, with roughly 68% earmarked for long-term development programs such as agriculture, environmental protection, and economic growth.

That year Jamaica was allocated $11.8 million, Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean $24 million, and a further $17 million was directed toward USAID Caribbean Development, a regional framework focused on climate resilience, economic security, and citizen safety.

While these sums represented only a small fraction of the overall U.S. foreign-aid budget, they carried far greater significance in the region. To put the scale into perspective, in 2024, Barbados’ GDP was approximately $7.5 billion and Saint Lucia’s about $2.5 billion. Jamaica’s agricultural sector generated roughly $1.75 billion that year.

In some cases, the assistance planned for the region in a single year exceeded the entire economic output of several Caribbean states.

“USAID’s work was an investment in both the present and the future,” said Racquel Moses, chief executive of the Caribbean Climate-Smart Accelerator and a global ambassador for the United Nations climate convention.

“Its dismantling has created an unacceptable level of uncertainty, undermining the very objectives the United States seeks to advance, including security, economic stability, and global influence.”

Sudden loss of programs

The funding was directed to a plethora of programs across the region.

In Jamaica, roughly $54 million had been allocated to USAID-funded programs across multiple budget cycles. Among them was EMPOWER, a five-year, $3 million initiative launched in late 2024 to improve education, training, and employment opportunities for vulnerable youth. Although not an agricultural program, it targeted livelihoods and economic resilience—factors that ultimately shape food access.

In the Dominican Republic, USAID launched a $2.7 million Resilient Agriculture Activity designed to help farmers cope with rising fertilizer prices, supply-chain disruptions, and climate-related challenges. The project aimed to benefit 1,500 farmers, including women and youth.

Many projects fell under the broader umbrella of the Caribbean Partnership to Address the Climate Crisis 2030 (PACC 2030), launched by Vice-President Kamala Harris following consultations with Caribbean leaders at the 2022 Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. Designed to strengthen climate resilience and accelerate the transition to clean energy, the initiative also placed significant emphasis on food security.

One of its flagship programs was the Caribbean Agricultural Productivity Improvement Activity. Launched in 2024 with a $6.3 million budget, CAPA sought to address rising food prices, poor nutrition, and supply-chain vulnerabilities.

The program aimed to connect farmers with buyers, reduce post-harvest losses, expand access to local food, promote climate-smart agriculture, and improve access to finance for smallholder farmers across Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Saint Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago.

In addition to the funds allocated to CAPA, projects under PACC 2030 were backed by tens of millions of dollars in funding from USAID, including an initial $20 million for climate-focused private sector investments, nearly $15 million for disaster risk reduction and resilience-building, and additional support for climate finance, research, and capacity-building initiatives.

USAID’s influence extended beyond its own programs. The agency was a major donor to initiatives implemented by organizations such as the World Food Programme, helping fund disaster preparedness, climate adaptation, food security, and economic development efforts throughout the Caribbean. Although the United States remains an important donor, support is now provided at substantially reduced levels.

The scale of the retrenchment has been considerable. By March 2025, an analysis by the Center for Global Development found that 73% of USAID programs in Jamaica, 77% in the Dominican Republic, and half of those in Haiti had been cancelled. Globally, agriculture experienced the fourth-largest reduction in USAID funding, with cuts totaling $1.17 billion.

The consequences extended beyond development programs. For decades, USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance played a central role in disaster preparedness and response across the Caribbean, helping governments prepare months before storms struck. Beyond providing emergency food aid, the bureau’s work helped strengthen resilience before disasters occurred.

“USAID would have been working with governments and embassies in the region on preparing for hurricane season,” said Sarah Charles, who led the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance during the Biden administration.

When Hurricane Melissa struck in 2025, it became the first major regional hurricane shock following USAID’s dismantling. By then, the bureau’s workforce had been reduced from more than 1,000 disaster specialists to a small team embedded within the U.S. State Department.

Although disaster-response teams were deployed after the storm, former officials argue that the United States entered the crisis with significantly less capacity than in previous years, lacking the planning networks, regional presence, pre-positioned resources, and technical expertise that had once underpinned its disaster response.

The way forward

Development programs are typically wound down gradually, allowing governments, implementing partners, and beneficiaries time to secure alternative funding, transfer knowledge, and complete work already underway.

For Edwards, the abrupt termination of CAPA had far-reaching consequences. “Ending CAPA leaves a major and largely irreplaceable gap,” he said. “Food security remains unchanged from 2024, suggesting the region has stalled since recovering from the 2020 food-price crisis,” he said.

“Without CAPA’s market linkages, smallholder farmers remain isolated and vulnerable. Without climate-smart training, farming communities face greater exposure to hurricanes, droughts, and erratic rainfall. And without lending reform, financial institutions are likely to keep treating agriculture as too risky, trapping the region in low investment, stagnant productivity, deeper import dependence, and unaffordable food prices.”

The Caribbean now faces the challenge of replacing not only lost funding but also the expertise, networks, and convening power that USAID brought to the region. The disruption has prompted a rethink of how development is financed, accelerating efforts to tap new types of funding.

The gap is also creating opportunities for private capital to play a larger role in Caribbean agriculture. If governments can develop the right incentives and risk-sharing mechanisms, investments in climate-smart farming, agricultural infrastructure, food processing, and supply-chain development could help unlock growth while reducing the region’s dependence on imported food.

As traditional development assistance becomes less certain, governments of the region must look beyond aid and towards new financing mechanisms capable of supporting agriculture, strengthening food security, and building resilience in a more unpredictable world.