Across the globe, governments are rethinking food policy in the face of climate change, supply chain disruptions, geopolitical instability, and rising food prices. In many cases, this reassessment has taken the form of renewed interest in food self-sufficiency, often framed in nationalist terms. While this shift reflects legitimate concerns about vulnerability and dependence, it also risks narrowing policy debates to questions of how much food can be produced within national borders.
Jamaica’s experience suggests that food self-sufficiency is limited when a country is closely interlinked to the global economy.
Beyond Production Targets
Food self-sufficiency policies often prioritize aggregate production: increasing yields, expanding domestic output, or reducing food imports. These goals are politically appealing and relatively easy to measure. Yet Jamaica demonstrates that high levels of domestic production alone do not define a resilient food system, nor does import dependence automatically signal weakness.
Despite long-standing reliance on food imports, Jamaica’s domestic food system continues to play a critical role in food access, employment, and cultural life. Small-scale farmers, informal vendors, local markets, and regionally embedded distribution networks provide flexibility and responsiveness that large-scale, globally integrated systems often lack. During moments of economic shock or supply disruption, these domestic systems can adapt quickly, cushioning households from volatility.
What Food Self-Reliance Looks Like in Practice
From a policy perspective, Jamaica illustrates that food self-reliance is less about autonomy from global trade and more about maintaining functional domestic capacity. This includes the ability to produce food locally, move it through diverse marketing channels, and ensure it remains culturally appropriate and accessible to consumers.
Crucially, this capacity is sustained not only through formal policy interventions, but through social relationships, informal institutions, and long-standing food practices. These elements are rarely captured in national food balance sheets, yet they are central to how food systems actually operate on the ground.
Lessons for Policymakers
Rather than offering a blueprint, Jamaica’s experience poses a series of questions that are increasingly relevant beyond the Caribbean:
How can food policies support domestic systems that already function under constraint, rather than attempting to replace them?
What roles do informal markets and small-scale producers play in resilience, and how might policy better recognize and protect them?
How can governments balance participation in global food trade with investments in domestic capacity that enhance flexibility and responsiveness?
What does resilience look like for consumers, not just producers, in terms of affordability, access, and cultural preference?
These questions point toward a broader understanding of food system resilience: one that extends beyond national self-sufficiency targets to encompass institutional strength, social embeddedness, and adaptive capacity.
A Caution on Food Nationalism
Jamaica’s experience also cautions against equating food self-reliance with food nationalism. Efforts to retreat from global food systems entirely are neither feasible nor desirable for most countries. The Caribbean tradition of self-reliance was never about isolation; it was about navigating global systems from a position of greater autonomy and reduced vulnerability.
For policymakers, this distinction matters. Nationalistic food policies that focus narrowly on borders and production risk overlooking the very systems that enable food to reach people during periods of uncertainty.
Reframing Resilience
As state governments confront an increasingly unstable global food landscape, Jamaica’s domestic food system offers a reframing of what resilience entails. It suggests that the goal is not simply to feed the nation from within, but to sustain diverse economic, social, and institutional capacities that allow food systems to endure, adapt, and respond when global systems falter.
In this sense, food self-reliance is less a destination than a way of thinking about how food systems function under pressure, and whose experiences and practices are recognized as central to resilience.