The Caribbean region needs a real food pantry more than ever. Because in 2025 a record was imported from outside the region. This is evident from figures from the Caribbean Export Development Agency. Suriname has been claiming for years that it can fill that gap, but continues to do what it has excelled at for decades: talking, promising and looking back at opportunities it has missed.
Text Armand Snijders
Image dWT archive
Figures recently presented during the Caribbean Week of Agriculture 2026 in Jamaica are as shocking as they are predictable. The Caribbean food import bill has now passed the astronomical mark of five billion US dollars – an increase of no less than 20 percent compared to 2022. Meanwhile, regional exports of agricultural products collapsed considerably last year by 7 percent. This was calculated by Damine Sinanan, CEO of the Caribbean Export Development Agency.
“Why would you sweat in the mud of the agricultural sector today if you think you will get rich overnight from oil tomorrow?“
Showpiece of the Caricom
On the other hand, there was the hobbyhorse that Caricom had been pursuing for years: reducing food imports by 25 percent by 2025. It is now the end of 2026 and that noble goal is further away than ever.
Suriname presented itself as the savior at the time. It would nourish the region for a while. Numerous commitments have been made to heads of state from Guyana, Barbados, Aruba and Trinidad and Tobago, among others. This resulted in friendly handshakes in front of the camera with smiling dignitaries, vague contracts and thick policy documents.
But as soon as the delegations had left Surinamese airspace, the daily lethargy returned. Nothing really happened at all. By the time the dream should have been realized, it had to be concluded that the country has not come any closer to the goal.
Intellectual anesthetic
The reality is that successive governments – presidents Desi Bouterse and Chandrikapersad Santokhi – talked about Surinamese potential as a ‘regional food basket’. However, in practice they have not received any of the fertile land. Current policymakers also don’t think much of it; the Geerlings-Simons government is mainly focused on future income from oil and gas, while the Surinamese soil lies fallow and the region is in danger of going hungry.
This agricultural paralysis is not a coincidence, but the direct result of the destructive policies of successive governments. The agricultural sector has been reduced to a populist plaything. Millions were spent on ill-considered projects and machines left to rust in the fields, while state-owned companies served or are serving as job carousels for political loyalists instead of centers of production. The agricultural infrastructure in Nickerie, Saramacca and Commewijne has been systematically neglected and the sector has been technically and financially stripped.
Suriname lacks a national agricultural vision. Policymakers refuse to understand that a sustainable economy rests on multiple pillars. All bets are on the approaching oil dollars from the offshore reserves. This acts as an intellectual anesthetic: why sweat in the mud of the agricultural sector today if you think you’ll get rich while sleeping on oil tomorrow?
Countries that neglect their agricultural base in favor of fossil wealth invariably end up with an inflation-prone economy – even a bunch of long beans have to be imported, experts warn – where the prices of local vegetables are determined by the issues of the day, as Surinamese consumers are currently experiencing. While farmers are bursting with debt due to the lack of decent credit facilities and access roads remain impassable, the leaders dream of petrodollars.
Export ambitions
Anyone who still has doubts about the apparent incompetence need only look at the official statistics from the General Bureau of Statistics and the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries (LVV). The reality is that Suriname imports four times as many agricultural products in value as it exports. Last year, the country spent more than two hundred million US dollars on the import of agricultural goods and basic food. In contrast, total agricultural exports remained at a paltry 66.1 million US dollars.
While ministers talk about export ambitions on international stages, the actual export volume is shrinking rapidly: from 81,174 tons in 2024 to 74,129 tons last year. And weekly vegetable exports to Europe plummeted from 65 tons in 2018 to a paltry eighteen tons now due to strict EU requirements and residue exceedances.
Foreign interest
It is the total disgrace of the Surinamese food pantry: the country cannot even manage to feed its own population without importing millions of dollars worth of American and Brazilian legs and Colombian and Dutch potatoes, onions and garlic. Let alone that it will save the Caribbean region.
Meanwhile, there has never been a lack of foreign interest and assistance. The irony is that this week a heavy delegation from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Caribbean Development Bank are in the country. Led by economist Julien Vallet, LVV Minister Mike Noersalim will explain which five production chains “offer the most possibilities”.
It actually makes you despondent. We are now building on a sector analysis that the FAO completed in 2024. Two years later and still in the phase of consultation, selection and drawing up profiles for potential investors. As long as there is no talk and no seed is put in the ground, there will never be a food shed.
Discussion sessions and research
Surinamese agricultural policy has become entangled in a vicious circle of discussions and research. People investigate the potential of potential, while practice on the field bleeds to death. The experts are closing in on the LVV Statistics department, but the bitter truth is that investors have known for a long time that Suriname is an administrative swamp where promises are rarely kept. Just take the Mennonite issue as an example.
“Suriname presented itself as a lifesaver at the time. It would nourish the region for a while”
Suriname has the land and water to become a regional food store. Caricom is longing for a reliable partner who can produce food on a large scale and professionally. The chance that Suriname can become this partner is now very small.
Failure to capitalize on agricultural potential is not a matter of force majeure, but of ordinary powerlessness and unwillingness; it is a conscious political choice to allow the sector to suffocate in bureaucracy and disinterest. As long as the focus remains exclusively on the oil sector, the region’s food basket will never get off the ground. And for which the rest of the region pays the hefty bill.
