Jamaica Urban Ornamental Fish Cluster — Consolidating Home-Based Aquaculture for Export (2014–2016)

Jamaica's ornamental fish sector is unusually fragmented: roughly 170 small, largely home-based aquaculture growers across the urban parishes of Kingston, St Andrew, St Catherine and Clarendon. From around 2014, the Compete Caribbean Partnership Facility (the IDB-housed regional competitiveness programme) funded The Competitiveness Company (TCC), a Kingston-based not-for-profit, to organise these growers into a single marketable cluster and fund a shared facility for storing, sorting and packing fish for export.
A 2016 independent evaluation for the IDB found the cluster's central facility had lifted export capacity to about 10,000 fish per month and had put growers in contact with a US importer seeking as much as 3.6 million fish a year - but the evaluators were explicit that output remained 'far from the target set out' in the cluster's original competitiveness plan. Jamaican government and trade-press reporting corroborate the underlying opportunity and constraint: TCC-led efforts to consolidate the roughly 170-farm cluster continued for years afterward, and as of 2025 Jamaica's Fisheries Division was still only around 90% complete on a newer, larger export clearinghouse facility intended to finally let the sector consolidate volume for large-scale commercial export.
The case is a useful corrective to success-story framing of cluster development: roughly a decade after Compete Caribbean's initial investment, Jamaica's ornamental fish exporters had still not closed the gap between demonstrated international demand and the country's packing and consolidation capacity.

Read the full analysis: https://thefishsite.com/articles/jamaica-to-tap-into-lucrative-ornamental-fish-exports