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Jamaica Urban Ornamental Fish Cluster — Consolidating Home-Based Aquaculture for Export (2014–2016)
Jamaica · Kingston · See the Jamaica profile · See the Kingston profile
Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 83% 52/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice
Compete Caribbean backed The Competitiveness Company's effort to organise ~170 small, mostly home-based ornamental-fish growers in Kingston, St Andrew, St Catherine and Clarendon into an export cluster - reaching 10,000 fish/month, short of a US buyer's 3.6M-a-year demand.
10,000 fish/month
Export capacity reached (2016)
3.6 million fish/year
US import demand identified (2016)
Details
- Maturity
- Scaling
- Promoter
- The Competitiveness Company (TCC), with Compete Caribbean Partnership Facility (IDB)
- Period
- 2014-2016
- Keywords
- aquaculture, ornamental fish, export development, urban agribusiness
Context
From around 2014, the Compete Caribbean Partnership Facility funded The Competitiveness Company (TCC), a Kingston non-profit, to organise roughly 170 fragmented, home-based ornamental-fish growers across Kingston, St Andrew, St Catherine and Clarendon into a single cluster with a shared export-packing facility.
Results
A 2016 independent IDB evaluation found the central facility had lifted export capacity to about 10,000 fish per month and connected growers to a US importer seeking up to 3.6 million fish a year, but evaluators were explicit that output remained 'far from the target' in the original competitiveness plan.
Conclusions
As of 2025, Jamaica's Fisheries Division was still only ~90% complete on a newer, larger export clearinghouse; roughly a decade after the initial investment, exporters had still not closed the gap between demonstrated demand and consolidation capacity.
Implementation
- Indicative cost
- Medium (€50k–€500k)
- Time to results
- Long (> 3 years)
- Staffing & skills
- The Competitiveness Company (TCC), Compete Caribbean Partnership Facility (IDB), Jamaica Fisheries Division
Conditions for success
- Completion of the larger export clearinghouse facility
- Sustained cluster-wide volume consolidation
Common failure modes
- Output remained 'far from the target' set in the original competitiveness plan a decade on
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Data sources
Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.
- C-NAPSE web research — accessed 2026-09-05
- The Competitiveness Company (TCC), with Compete Caribbean Partnership Facility (IDB) — accessed 2026-09-05
- The Fish Site / Jamaica Information Service: Jamaica to Tap into Lucrative Ornamental Fish Exports — accessed 2026-09-05
- Compete Caribbean Final Evaluation Report (Technopolis Group, 2016), p.65 — accessed 2026-09-05
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