Caribbean Food Security, One Year After The Collapse Of USAID

BusinessFood & DrinkCaribbean Food Security, One Year After The Collapse Of USAIDByDaphne Ewing-Chow,Senior Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Stories about food & agriculture through the lens of climate changeFollow AuthorMay 30, 2026, 06:14pm EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.A Surinamese farmer collects eggplants on his agricultural plot. Photo by Ranu AbhelakhAFP via Getty ImagesIn 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 FOR YOUMore than a year later, the region is still grappling with the consequences....