CARICOM Extends Its Food Security Drive To 2030

The region missed its 2025 deadline to cut food imports by a quarter, but production is up and the target now runs to 2030.

A regional bill, rewritten

CARICOM's signature agriculture campaign, the 25 by 2025 initiative, set out to cut the region's food import bill by 25% by the end of 2025. That deadline has passed without the full target met. On February 21, 2025, Guyana's President Dr. Irfaan Ali announced that Heads of Government had expanded and extended the initiative to 2030, reframing it around a broader push for a resilient, sustainable and competitive regional food system. The import bill the effort targets stands at more than US$6 billion a year.

What the numbers show

The extension is not a retreat from progress. Ali, who serves as CARICOM's Lead Head of Government for Agriculture and Food Security, has cited roughly a 24% increase in food production across the region between 2022 and late 2024. Earlier data he presented to the 47th Heads of Government meeting in Grenada in July 2024 pointed to a 12% decline in food imports in real terms, worth about US$250 million, and a CARICOM and World Food Programme survey from April 2024 recording a drop in food insecurity to 17% of the surveyed population.

Officials have been candid that external shocks slowed the timeline. Hurricane Beryl caused agricultural damage estimated at about US$150 million in 2024, and leaders have pointed to global trade uncertainty and supply chain disruption as further drags on the schedule.

Guyana at the center

Guyana has positioned itself as the production engine of the strategy. Its 2026 national agriculture budget reached a record GY$104.6 billion, roughly US$500 million, up sharply from GY$18.4 billion in 2020. Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha chairs the CARICOM Ministerial Task Force on Agriculture. The country has moved beyond planning into shipments, sending cassava chips and mango pulp to Antigua and corn, soya and poultry to Barbados, with Ali describing Guyana as self-sufficient across key food categories and pressing an ambition to become the Caribbean's food capital.

The stubborn barriers

The obstacles the region must still clear are structural rather than agronomic. CARICOM's own framing identifies three: inadequate regional air and sea transportation for moving produce between islands, the difficulty of financing and insuring farmers, and persistent trade barriers between member states. To address the financing gap, the region has stood up a Caribbean Food Systems Investment Initiative and a US$100 million regional agriculture fund, and launched the Regional Economic Agri-Insurance Programme in July 2024. The European Union has committed a 19 million euro programme to strengthen Caribbean agri-food systems. Analysts continue to argue that without a unified intra-regional transport strategy, produce grown in surplus in one territory cannot reliably reach shortage markets in another.

On target, on a longer clock

By May 2026, Ali described the initiative as on target, reporting that the region had reached 88% of its production goal for non-traditional crops. The recalibration to 2030 gives CARICOM room to convert rising output into a durable cut in dependence on imported food. The measure of success is no longer a single date. It is whether the region can pair record production with the transport, finance and trade reforms that turn harvests into full plates across the Caribbean.