Dutch Caribbean food security: the full picture we keep missing

Food forest at Mon Plaisir Basisschool, Aruba.

Author: Rendell de Kort, Economist

Category: Agriculture | Food Security | Dutch Caribbean

In 2018, I wrote on this blog that Aruba's agricultural sector was "ripe for the picking." The obstacles that had traditionally held the sector back were falling away. Entrepreneurs like 297 Farm, Happyponics and Cunucu Fresh were already proving that local food production could work in Aruban conditions. The Farm to Fork connection with tourism was emerging. The Venezuela border closure had reminded everyone that food security matters.

Two years later, during COVID, I joined a World Bank team tasked with producing Aruba's first comprehensive food security assessment. The pandemic had turned that abstract reminder into a lived experience: empty shelves, broken supply chains, a country that imports over 90% of its food suddenly confronting what that dependency actually means.

What happened next was not in any policy paper. Arubans planted. They shared seeds. They asked abuelas how their grandparents grew food in this climate. Backyard production expanded in ways no program predicted. Online Facebook markets emerged where home growers traded surplus. Hotels and restaurants started sourcing more locally when imports faltered. The resilience was not in the system. It was in the people. Similar stories played out across the Dutch Caribbean, each island responding in its own way to the same underlying vulnerability: extreme dependence on food imports in a region where supply chains can be severed overnight.

Our Aruba report tried to capture that reality. We started from the island's specific factor endowments, its constraints in land, water, soil, and energy, and worked outward to identify what would actually function in those conditions. The strategy we proposed rested on two equally weighted pillars.

The first was commercial-scale agriculture: capital-intensive, technology-driven, water-efficient enterprises such as vertical farming, aquaculture, and food processing that could operate profitably within Aruba's unusual parameters.

The second, and equally important, was widespread micro-scale residential production: the collective capacity of backyard gardens, rooftop plots, school gardens, and community growing spaces that together represent what we called a "sleeping giant" of potential food production on a densely urbanised island.

The report was explicit that these two pillars required fundamentally different support structures. Commercial enterprises need project finance, technology transfer, and business plan development. Micro-scale producers need technology kits, extension services, demonstration farms, and accessible grant mechanisms. What they share is a need for institutional infrastructure that does not yet exist: an Observatory function to track what works, aggregate data from both commercial and household producers, and connect local experimentation with global agricultural research networks. We proposed a Farm to Fork framework that would structurally connect producers to HORECA channels and genuine gastronomy. We laid out ten strategic guidelines spanning public engagement, quality standards, youth involvement, agro-tourism, land access, logistics, and risk financing. And we structured implementation across three components with three funding scenarios, including one requiring zero additional public budget, recognizing that not every island can or should wait for external financing to begin.

The Government of Curaçao subsequently requested a comparable assessment through the same EU-funded facility, which I also co-authored. That report went further in several directions. It proposed 32 specific interventions clustered under four themes. It introduced the Productive Alliances model, a methodology the World Bank has refined over twenty years in Latin America and the Caribbean, designed to link farmers directly to buyers through tailored business plans with built-in technical assistance. The model brings together three core agents: producers, buyers, and technical service providers, using the business plan as the instrument to fund, track, and evaluate investments. The Curaçao report also laid out three funding scenarios, again including a minimal-budget option.

The critical point is this: the Curaçao report was deliberately different from the Aruba report. Because Curaçao is different from Aruba. Its rainfall patterns differ. Its groundwater availability differs significantly. Its soil composition differs. Its energy matrix, its port infrastructure, its relationship with Venezuela, its syntropic farming movement, its tourism composition and volume, its supermarket structure. The entire logic of commissioning two separate assessments was that each island requires its own approach, calibrated to its own conditions, constraints, and opportunities. That was the methodology.

Since those reports were produced, a significant body of Caribbean-generated research has emerged. Through ZonMw-funded programmes and international academic partnerships, including a sustained research collaboration between the University of Aruba and University College Utrecht, researchers at the Universities of Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten have produced peer-reviewed work spanning food sovereignty, food system transformation, and economic resilience.

At the University of Aruba specifically, work on food sovereignty as a legal and policy concept has deepened our understanding of what food security actually requires in a small island context: not just access to food, but agency over how food systems are designed and governed. A synthesis paper I co-authored with colleagues across all three universities (De Jong et al.) identified thirteen distinct research activities and five transformation strategies across the region. The knowledge base exists. It should be informing policy.

The Dutch Caribbean Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries Alliance (DCALFA), a regional cooperation platform founded by the islands themselves with support from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency and the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, already provides an existing mechanism for coordinated but locally-driven food policy. All six territories signed a memorandum of understanding in 2023, and the alliance recently presented a 2025-2035 roadmap. This is precisely the kind of bottom-up, inter-island structure that both World Bank reports envisioned as the foundation for sustainable food security.

Nearly six years after the Aruba report and three years after the Curaçao report, the policy conversation has narrowed considerably. The current approach centres on a centrally managed revolving fund with an accompanying training programme, supplemented by government subsidies. These are legitimate instruments. But they represent a fraction of what was recommended.

The micro-scale production pillar, the one that actually proved itself when COVID disrupted supply chains, barely features. No Observatory function has been established. The Farm to Fork framework remains informal. The Productive Alliances model has not been piloted. The university research has not been integrated into programme design. And the island-specific methodology that underpinned both reports has given way to a single approach managed from one location.

Access to finance matters, and farmers who need credit should have it. But comprehensive food security requires more than a revolving fund with a training programme. Both World Bank assessments are part of the evidence base that informed current policy discussions. As a co-author of both, I think the public conversation deserves the full picture of what they actually recommended.

And the full picture is actually encouraging. The farmers I speak with are not waiting for credit. They are experimenting with regenerative techniques. Restaurants are building relationships with local producers. Community gardens are feeding neighbourhoods. The universities are producing actionable research. DCALFA is building inter-island cooperation from the ground up. The ingredients for resilient food systems are already here. They just do not fit into a single fund structure.

The HORECA opportunity. What a production Observatory could deliver. The land access conversation that keeps getting deferred. How the Productive Alliances model could work in island economies. The farmers who are building resilience without anyone's permission.

Because on a small island, food security is not primarily a financing problem. It is an ecosystem problem. As the Stockholm Resilience Centre reminds us, investments in sustainable food systems simultaneously improve food security, strengthen ecosystems, and open new economic opportunities. But they also caution that without an equity lens, resilience investment risks reproducing existing injustices or creating new ones.

That warning deserves attention in the Dutch Caribbean right now. Because ecosystems grow from the ground up.

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Disclosure: The author served as commissioner of the Aruba Agriculture Development Company and as a consultant to the Government of Aruba. The views expressed here are the author's own and represent his professional assessment as co-author of both World Bank reports.

The World Bank reports "Building Resilience in Aruba's Food Security During the Pandemic and Beyond" (2020) and "Curaçao Food Security Assessment: Enhancing the Resilience of Vulnerable Households while Boosting Sustainable Economic Growth" (2023) are publicly available on the World Bank documents repository. The 2018 article "Agriculture in Aruba: A sector ripe for the picking" can be found on this blog.