Caribbean Agrifood Business Session n°1

Post-COVID-19: Resilience building and new opportunities for Caribbean businesses

Despite these major disruptions, the COVID-19 pandemic also represents an opportunity for a paradigm shift in the way people produce and consume food and creates new opportunities for businesses. Health and safety concerns, transparency in the chain, and closer relations with producers have become a strong feature in many markets.

Closer linkages between the agriculture and the tourism sector are essential to promote local sourcing and support to the local value chain actors and this can be achieved in rebuilding a more sustainable tourism industry.

The conditions must be created so that this crisis leads to new opportunities for a regional approach to food security, increased intra- and inter-regional trade, and the acceleration of investments in logistics and infrastructure. During the pandemic, the lack of intra-regional trade logistics was a real constraint to the circulation of food items across countries.

Domestic markets for food could become more diversified through improved technologies and innovations. Food production and distribution channels that are well coordinated are best positioned to adapt to changing patterns in demand and take advantage of new business opportunities, in particular on processing. In the near future, the new food-demand patterns will be based on online shopping and the supply patterns based on flexibility, local proximity and response capacity.

The private sector will need to strengthen key value chain operations, provide new services and develop new products without compromising with food safety standards. Regional markets together with export will offer new opportunities for diversification in production and marketing.

The acceleration of uptake in information and communication tools will also be required in support of business opportunities, especially information sharing platforms which can link farmers, processors and consumers and marketplaces. During the pandemic, agricultural, B2B and B2C e-commerce platforms have increased and partly addressed access to perishable products. From the consumer side, increased support towards healthy food and local markets has also to be strengthened which includes increased uptake of domestically sourced fruits and vegetables and some animal products and the ability of local and regional supply chains to meet these needs. The food industry which was providing hotels (now closed) is redistributing fresh food in support of the most needed.

Smallholder farmers and businesses must have access to adapted finance, so that they can continue to produce.

It is essential to collect, analyse and share reliable data on the availability of products and inputs, prices, information on storage and cold storage availability, logistical bottlenecks, causes of waste… to be able to provide better advice to the farmers and take informed decisions.