The Food Bill and the Deal Book

On Tuesday 16 June 2026, in Bridgetown, the United Nations Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean convened a one-day Food Systems Investment Forum. The theme was Mobilising Equity Capital for Resilient Food Systems in the Caribbean. It closed with the launch of a Deal Book listing US$320 million in investment-ready projects across agriculture, fisheries, processing, and logistics. Two days later the Caribbean Economic Forum opened in the same city, with food security among its deal tracks. The week put one number beside another.

The region imports roughly 60 per cent of the food it eats. CARICOM puts the annual food import bill above US$6 billion. The "25 by 2025" target, agreed to cut that bill by a quarter, was extended to 2030 at the 48th Conference of Heads of Government in Barbados from 19 to 21 February 2025. The reasons given were concrete: Hurricane Beryl in 2024, and higher world prices for meat, dairy, vegetable oil, and raw sugar. Production has moved. CARICOM reports food output across the region rose about 24 per cent between 2022 and late 2024. The bill itself has not fallen by a quarter. The space between those two figures is the financing gap the Bridgetown forum was called to name. As the UN Resident Coordinator put it, the capital exists but is not connected to the productive food economy. Money goes into real estate, not into cold chains and processing.

For Barbados the food bill is not only a grocery question. It is a balance-of-payments question. Every dollar spent on imported food is a dollar of foreign exchange not held in reserve, and reserves are the anchor of the exchange-rate peg the country has defended since 1975. Barbados has tied its recovery plan, BERT, to growth and food-import-substitution goals, which places agriculture inside fiscal policy rather than beside it. The forum's framing matters here. Loans and grants have carried Caribbean food projects for years. Equity has not. John Morris of the CaribGROW Fund called equity the missing ingredient, the form of capital that lets a firm scale while families keep ownership and wealth stays in the region. The Agriculture Minister, Dr Shantal Munro-Knight, drew the parallel to the Bridgetown Initiative: terms set as equals, and capital structured differently. A US$320 million pipeline is small against a US$6 billion bill.

A deal book is a list of intentions until the money moves. The measure is not the launch in June. It is whether, a year from now, the import bill has bent and the projects have closed. The capital exists. Connecting it is the work.