How Costa Rica stopped feeding itself — and what it will take to get its food back
There is a phrase that defines Costa Rica to the world.
Pura Vida. Pure life. You hear it as a greeting, a farewell, a response to nearly any question. It is the emotional signature of a country that has made well-being its national identity. When the world thinks of Costa Rica, it thinks of rainforests and renewable energy, of biodiversity and stability, of a small nation that abolished its army in 1948 and redirected the savings into schools and hospitals. A country, in other words, that organized itself around life rather than around power.
That brand is not manufactured. It is earned. Costa Rica generates more than 98% of its electricity from renewable sources. It has placed over 27% of its land under formal protection. By almost every measure of human development and ecological stewardship in the Western Hemisphere, it outperforms nations many times its size. The world has noticed, and the world has believed it.
And that is precisely why what is happening to Costa Rica’s food system is so significant. Not because a small country is struggling with agricultural policy — that happens everywhere. But because the country that built the world’s most credible sustainability brand is quietly, systematically, and with increasing urgency losing its ability to feed itself.
In 2024, the government of Costa Rica was forced to authorize emergency duty-free imports of black beans to prevent a domestic shortage.
Black beans. The foundational ingredient of gallo pinto — the rice and bean dish that is not just a meal but a cultural identity, served at breakfast across the country, every day, in every home, from San José to Limón to the highlands of Cartago. The dish that is Costa Rica before any flag or anthem or slogan. That dish nearly ran out. Not because of a natural disaster. Not because of a war. Because the country had, over thirty years of gradual and deliberate policy choices, stopped growing the food its people eat.
I have been coming to Costa Rica for years. In Panama, I developed what the Smithsonian Institution recognized as the first closed-loop organic farm in Central America — a fully self-contained system with complete water recycling and zero waste output that became an international study site for universities from around the world. I travel this region with eyes trained to see what the land produces, and more importantly, what it no longer does. What I have observed in Costa Rica over the past two decades is something that the statistics confirm but that no graph quite captures the texture of: a country where food production has become nearly invisible. The fields that once grew rice and corn and beans have been replaced, systematically, by pineapple and banana and palm oil — not for Costa Rican tables, but for foreign markets. The processing plants that should exist, that would convert what is grown into what people eat, were never built. And in the meantime, the supermarket shelves filled up with imported goods, the waistlines of a historically lean and active population began to expand, and the Pura Vida brand kept shining, because nobody was looking behind it.
This article is about what is behind it.
It is about the trade agreements that restructured Costa Rica’s agricultural incentives, who funded the campaigns that made those agreements possible, and who has profited from the dependency that followed. It is about a system that extracts value from one of the most fertile and biodiverse agricultural regions on earth while returning almost none of that value to the people who live there. It is about the health of Ticos — their bodies, which have changed visibly and measurably as their diet shifted from the food their grandparents grew to the processed imports their grandparents would not recognize. And it is about the political architecture that made all of this not just possible but persistent.
But it is also about something larger than Costa Rica.
Central America sits on some of the most productive agricultural land on earth. Year-round growing seasons. Extraordinary elevation diversity. Water. Biodiversity. The capacity to grow almost anything. For thirty years these nations have been told that their role in the global economy is to produce export commodities cheaply and import their food efficiently. That arrangement has kept them dependent, kept them divided, and kept the value of what they produce flowing outward rather than feeding the people who grow it.
The global moment is shifting — and shifting faster than almost anyone anticipated. A war in Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz and sent the global fertilizer supply into crisis. The supply chains that seemed permanent are proving fragile. The nations that can grow food — diverse, year-round, in a changing climate — are discovering that they hold leverage they were never supposed to recognize. This article is also about that recognition. About what becomes possible when a producing nation stops seeing itself as a commodity supplier and starts seeing itself as what it actually is: a sovereign power with something the world increasingly needs.
Costa Rica, with its brand, its institutional credibility, and its environmental standing, is positioned to lead that shift. A new government has just taken office with a mandate to act. Whether it will depends on choices being made right now — in the fields that have gone fallow, in the legislative chambers in San José, and among the people who have been told for a generation that Pura Vida is a feeling rather than a food system.
It is time to make it both.
SECTION TWO: How It Happened — The Thirty-Year Trade-Off
Costa Rica did not wake up one morning and decide to stop feeding itself.
The transformation happened gradually, rationally, and with the support of institutions and advisors who, in many cases, believed they were acting in the country’s best interest. Understanding how it happened is not about assigning blame to a single moment or a single actor. It is about tracing a sequence of decisions that each made sense in isolation and that together produced an outcome nobody who voted for them was willing to publicly own.
It starts, as so many things in Central America do, with a trade agreement.
The Promise of CAFTA-DR
In 2007, Costa Rica held a national referendum on whether to ratify the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement with the United States — CAFTA-DR. It was the first time in the country’s history that a trade agreement had been put directly to a popular vote, and the campaign that preceded it was unlike anything Costa Rica had experienced.
The argument for CAFTA-DR was coherent and genuinely believed by many who made it. Free trade with the United States would open export markets for Costa Rican products, attract foreign investment, lower consumer prices on imported goods, and integrate a small Central American economy into the most powerful trade network in the hemisphere. Costa Rica’s export sectors — pineapple, banana, coffee, medical devices — stood to gain direct preferential access to the US market. The diplomatic alignment with Washington would carry its own benefits. For a country that had spent decades building its stability on trade openness and foreign investment, CAFTA-DR looked like the logical next step.
On October 7, 2007, Costa Rica voted yes. The margin was 51.6% in favor, 48.4% opposed — the narrowest possible majority for a decision of national consequence.
What that margin does not tell you is what happened in the months before it.
The Campaign and Who Paid for It
The pro-CAFTA campaign — known as Sí al TLC — was one of the most expensive political campaigns in Costa Rica’s history. It was funded by a coalition that included UCCAEP, the umbrella organization of Costa Rica’s business sector, CINDE, the foreign investment promotion agency, and a range of business interests with direct and documented financial stakes in the agreement’s passage. Organizations aligned with US trade policy interests were active in the information environment surrounding the vote. USAID-funded programs that explicitly supported trade liberalization advocacy in the region were operating in Costa Rica in the years preceding the referendum — a fact documented in USAID’s own program reports, which are public record.
On the other side, the No al TLC campaign was funded by labor unions, farmer cooperatives, and domestic civil society organizations. It was dramatically outspent.
The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court — the Sala IV — received complaints about campaign financing irregularities during the referendum period. The chamber’s ruling was narrow and did not result in findings of violation. But the complaint, the spending asymmetry, and the identity of the interests that funded the winning side are all matters of public record.
We are not alleging that any law was broken. We are documenting something more straightforward: a vote that determined whether Costa Rica’s domestic food production would be exposed to unrestricted competition from subsidized US agricultural exports was won by the side that was funded by interests who would benefit from that exposure. The 51.6% margin tells you how close it was. The spending differential tells you something about how that margin was achieved. The readers can decide what that means.
What the Agreement Actually Did
CAFTA-DR delivered on many of its stated promises. Export revenues grew. Foreign investment increased. Certain sectors became globally competitive. Costa Rica’s economic integration with the United States deepened in ways that produced genuine benefits for specific industries and specific populations.
But trade agreements are not neutral instruments. They restructure incentives across an entire economy, and the incentives that CAFTA-DR restructured were agricultural ones.
Staple crops — rice, beans, corn — became progressively less competitive as tariff protections were phased down and US commodity exports, many of them produced with federal subsidies and at industrial scale, entered the Costa Rican market at prices domestic farmers could not match. Landowners who once grew food for the Costa Rican table discovered that pineapple and banana and palm oil, grown for export, generated better returns than the crops their parents had grown. Farming communities in the interior that had organized their economic lives around staple food production found themselves facing pricing pressure they had no mechanism to resist.
The land responded to the incentives. By some estimates, Costa Rica saw a reduction of up to 70% in the land area dedicated to domestic food crop production over the three decades following trade liberalization. The specific numbers vary by crop and by year, but the direction is not in dispute. Rice fields became pineapple plantations. Bean cultivation contracted. Corn acreage declined. The agricultural landscape that had fed Costa Rica for generations was systematically redirected toward feeding foreign markets.
And what replaced domestic food production on Costa Rican tables? Imports. Processed ones, mostly. The kind that arrive in containers from the United States, packaged and shelf-stable and optimized for distribution efficiency rather than nutritional value.
The Structural Logic Nobody Talked About
Here is the part that the economic models of 2007 did not foreground, though the evidence was available to anyone who looked for it.
When you reduce tariff protection on imported staple foods and simultaneously make export agriculture more attractive, you do not simply open a market. You restructure a food system. Domestic producers, unable to compete with subsidized imports, exit the market. Processing infrastructure — the freezing plants, the packaging lines, the cold storage networks that would allow domestic production to reach consumers in usable form — is never built, because the economics of processing domestically produced food no longer pencil out when the imported finished product is cheaper. Farming knowledge, accumulated across generations, disperses as the farmers who carried it move to cities or to service industry jobs. Land consolidates into fewer hands growing export monocultures.
Once that process runs for fifteen or twenty years, it becomes very difficult to reverse. You cannot simply restore tariffs and expect domestic production to return. The farmers are gone. The infrastructure was never built. The knowledge is partially lost. The supply chains have reoriented. What looks from the outside like a policy choice has become a structural condition.
This is not hypothetical. It is what happened. And it is why, in 2024, the government of a country that grows pineapple for the world’s supermarkets had to import black beans on an emergency basis to prevent its people from running out of the ingredient that defines their national breakfast.
What the Argument in Good Faith Cannot Explain
Let us be clear about what we are and are not saying.
Many of the people who voted for CAFTA-DR, who campaigned for it, who presented the economic case for it in good faith, believed what they were saying. Trade liberalization has produced genuine benefits in specific domains. The Costa Rican economy is more sophisticated, more diversified, and in several ways more productive than it was in 2007. The agreement was not a simple act of national betrayal.
But there is a question that the good-faith argument cannot answer.
If the structural consequences of trade liberalization on domestic food security were predictable — and they were, the academic literature on this was extensive and available — then why were protections for domestic staple food production not built into the agreement? Why were the tariff phase-down schedules for rice and beans and corn not accompanied by transition support for domestic producers? Why was no investment requirement for domestic processing infrastructure attached to the market access that foreign exporters received?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions that separate a trade agreement designed to serve a national interest from one designed to serve the interests of those on the other side of the table. And they remain unanswered.
The Number That Does Not Move
Fifteen years after CAFTA-DR came into force in Costa Rica, the United States exports more than one billion dollars in agricultural products to Costa Rica annually. That figure has grown at an average of 14% per year over the prior five years. For a country of 5.2 million people, it is one of the highest per-capita food import figures in the hemisphere.
On the other side of that ledger, domestic rice production has collapsed by 50% since 2022 tariff reforms. 73% of black beans are imported. 69% of domestic corn consumption relies on imports. 100% of wheat, yellow corn, and soybeans are imported.
A country that cannot produce its staple grains is a country that has outsourced the most fundamental act of national sovereignty. It did not happen accidentally. It happened because a set of policy decisions, made over thirty years and accelerated by a referendum won by the better-funded side, restructured the incentives of an entire agricultural economy away from feeding the nation and toward serving the export markets that paid for the campaign.
That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a sequence of documented events with documented beneficiaries. And the Ticos paying for it — at the breakfast table, at the supermarket, and in the doctor’s office — deserve to know the sequence.
SECTION THREE: The Glass Ceiling — Who Benefits and How the System Stays in Place
Follow the money. It is the oldest instruction in investigative journalism, and it remains the most reliable one. Not because every outcome is the product of deliberate corruption — it is not — but because money reveals alignment, and alignment reveals whose interests a system is actually designed to serve.
When you follow the money in Costa Rica’s food system, it does not lead you to a single bad actor or a smoking document. It leads you to something more durable and more difficult to dismantle: a set of aligned incentives that reward dependency and penalize sovereignty, operating through entirely legal channels, producing outcomes that benefit specific and identifiable interests while the cost is distributed invisibly across an entire population.
Understanding this requires looking at three levels simultaneously: the external architecture that created the dependency, the domestic layer that profits from maintaining it, and the political structure that ensures neither is seriously challenged.
The External Architecture: A Billion-Dollar Market Worth Protecting
Begin with the numbers, because they establish the incentive.
The United States exports more than one billion dollars in agricultural products to Costa Rica every year. For a country of 5.2 million people, this is an extraordinary figure — one of the highest per-capita food import relationships in the hemisphere. It is not an accident. It is the product of sustained, institutional, and explicitly stated effort.
The United States Department of Agriculture maintains a permanent Foreign Agricultural Service office in San José. This is not a diplomatic courtesy. The FAS office has a stated mission: to expand US agricultural exports into the Costa Rican market. It publishes detailed annual reports identifying “best prospect” categories — the product segments where US exporters have the greatest opportunity to grow their market share. It monitors tariff schedules, tracks competitor nations, and provides intelligence and strategic support to US agricultural exporters seeking to expand their presence in Costa Rica.
This is not hidden. It is published policy, available on the USDA website. A foreign government agency, funded by US taxpayers, is permanently stationed in San José with the explicit objective of ensuring that Costa Rica continues to buy American food.
We are not suggesting this is improper on its own terms. Every major agricultural exporting nation does something similar. What we are suggesting is that when you are trying to understand why Costa Rica’s domestic food production has declined while its dependence on US food imports has grown, the existence of a permanent, well-resourced, strategically sophisticated US government operation dedicated to exactly that outcome is not a peripheral fact. It is a central one.
A billion-dollar annual export market does not maintain itself. It is maintained.
The Domestic Layer: Who Profits from the Import System
Once a country shifts from domestic food production to import dependency, a new domestic power structure emerges alongside the external one. It does not replace local interests — it captures them.
The transition from production to importation creates a class of economic actors whose livelihoods depend on the continuation of that transition: import license holders, grain millers who process foreign commodity crops, large-scale distributors with established supply chains, and the financial institutions that fund the import cycle. These actors do not benefit from a Costa Rica that grows its own rice and beans and corn. They benefit from a Costa Rica that buys those things from abroad, with them in the middle.
In the rice sector specifically — the sector most dramatically disrupted by the 2022 tariff reforms — the structure is visible. The Ruta del Arroz reform, which slashed tariff protections on imported rice and triggered a 50% collapse in domestic production within two years, was a policy decision with a specific legislative history, specific votes, and specific timing. In the months following that reform, import volumes surged. The infrastructure to receive, mill, and distribute imported rice was already in place — because the entities that held that infrastructure had been operating within CAFTA-DR’s import quota system for years and had built their capacity accordingly.
CAFTA-DR’s quota allocation mechanism is instructive here. Historically, import quotas under such frameworks are allocated based on prior import volume — meaning the companies already operating in the import system receive the largest allocations when quotas expand. This is a standard feature of quota-based trade systems, not a Costa Rican anomaly. But its effect is to systematically favor established importers over domestic producers whenever policy shifts toward openness. The people positioned to benefit from the reform were the people who helped create the conditions for it.
We are not alleging that any specific individual was paid to vote for the Ruta del Arroz reform. What we are documenting is that the reform had clear and immediate beneficiaries, that those beneficiaries were identifiable in advance, and that the reform passed. The sequencing — who benefited, who had the political relationships to advocate for the change, and whether those two groups overlap — is a question that Costa Rican investigative journalists and legislators are in a better position than we are to answer conclusively. We are asking the question. The people of Costa Rica deserve an answer.
The Political Architecture: The Glass Ceiling
There is a pattern across Central America that is too consistent across too many countries and too many decades to be explained by coincidence or by the independent miscalculations of seven different governments.
In every Central American nation, across different political parties and different administrations, the fundamental structure of agricultural trade policy has followed the same trajectory: export monocultures encouraged, domestic staple production deprioritized, trade agreements that benefit foreign exporters ratified, domestic processing infrastructure not built, import dependency deepened. Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica — different histories, different governments, different cultures — and the same agricultural outcome.
The explanation that fits the evidence is not that all of these governments independently reached the same wrong conclusion. It is that the incentive structure within which their political leaders operate was designed to produce this outcome.
Here is the structure as it actually operates, stated plainly.
Political careers in Central America are built and sustained through access to external resources — financing, diplomatic support, post-office opportunities, and the international legitimacy that makes a political figure viable. The United States, through its diplomatic apparatus, its multilateral influence, and its trade policy leverage, is the most significant single source of that external validation in the region. Alignment with US economic interests — including, critically, the trade frameworks that maintain US agricultural market access — is not merely rewarded. It is the architecture through which regional political viability is constructed.
This does not require direct payments to individuals, though there is documented evidence from other sectors and other countries that such payments occur. It operates primarily through the career structure itself. A Central American politician who champions domestic food sovereignty, who proposes tariff protection for staple crop producers, who advocates for a regional food framework that reduces dependence on US agricultural exports — that politician will find certain doors closed, certain financing unavailable, certain diplomatic courtesies withheld. Not through any overt act. Through the quiet operation of a system that has organized itself to reward compliance and create friction for independence.
This is what I mean when I say there is a glass ceiling in Central America. It is not a conspiracy. It does not require a coordinated plan or a secret agreement. It is a structural reality, built over decades of trade policy, aid conditionality, and political relationship management, that has made genuine agricultural sovereignty politically costly for any individual leader to pursue and politically rewarding to abandon.
The United States has operated this way in the hemisphere for most of the twentieth century. It is documented in the historical record of the Alliance for Progress, in the structural adjustment programs of the IMF and World Bank that conditioned financing on agricultural trade liberalization, and in the consistent pattern of US diplomatic and economic support for Central American governments that maintained open agricultural markets and withdrew that support from governments that attempted to protect domestic food production. You do not need to call this a conspiracy. You can simply call it a pattern, read the historical record, and decide for yourself whether it describes what happened to Costa Rica’s food system.
The Comfortable Fiction
There is a version of this story that powerful interests would prefer Costa Ricans to believe.
That version says: the market decided. Domestic farmers were not competitive. Consumers benefited from lower prices. The trade agreement was ratified by a majority of Costa Rican voters. The outcomes, while imperfect, were the result of rational economic choices made by free actors in a transparent system.
Each of those statements contains a partial truth. Domestic farmers were not competitive — because they were exposed to competition from an agricultural system backed by US federal subsidies, operating at a scale that no Costa Rican smallholder could match. Consumers did benefit from lower short-term prices — while absorbing long-term costs in the form of nutritional decline, food system fragility, and loss of cultural food identity that do not show up in the consumer price index. The agreement was ratified by a majority — the narrowest possible majority, in a campaign funded by an asymmetric coalition, on a question whose long-term consequences were not fully presented to the voters who decided it.
The comfortable fiction holds as long as the food keeps arriving on the shelves. The emergency bean import of 2024 was the moment it began to crack. Because when the government of a country has to call for emergency imports of the ingredient in its national dish, the fiction that the system is working for the people who live within it becomes impossible to sustain.
The Quiet Beneficiaries
Let us name the structure clearly, without accusation and without softening.
There are actors who benefit, directly and materially, from Costa Rica’s food import dependency. US agricultural exporters benefit from a billion-dollar annual market that is maintained by trade frameworks, quota systems, and a government office dedicated to expanding their share of it. Domestic import license holders and distributors benefit from the volume and control that import dependency creates. The financial institutions that finance import cycles benefit from the continued flow. The political figures who maintain relationships with these interests benefit from the resources those relationships provide.
There are actors who pay for that dependency. The domestic farmer who could not compete with subsidized imports and lost their land or their livelihood. The worker in a rural canton whose agricultural employment disappeared when staple crop production contracted. The Tico family whose food bill is denominated in global commodity prices they have no influence over. The child whose diet shifted from rice and beans and fresh vegetables to processed imports, and whose body has registered that shift in ways we will discuss in the section that follows.
The system did not harm everyone equally. It transferred value systematically — from domestic producers to foreign exporters, from rural agricultural communities to urban distribution networks, from the long-term resilience of the nation to the short-term profit margins of the entities positioned to benefit from its dependence.
That transfer did not happen by accident. It happened through policy. Policy has authors. Those authors made choices. And the people of Costa Rica have every right to know who made them, what those authors gained, and whether the choices were made in the national interest or in someone else’s.
What This Means for Investment
There is one more dimension to this that deserves clarity, because this article is read not only by Ticos demanding accountability from their government but by investors, by development finance institutions, and by the international community that takes Costa Rica’s sustainability brand seriously.
The same structural capture that drove Costa Rica’s food system into dependency is the primary risk factor for any investment in domestic food sovereignty. If the policy environment that destroyed domestic production can be recreated at the stroke of a legislative pen — if the interests that benefit from import dependency retain the political relationships to block or undermine investment in domestic production and processing — then capital deployed to rebuild that system faces the same headwinds that destroyed it the first time.
This is why the first year of the Fernández administration is not merely a domestic political question. It is an investment condition. The new government must signal — in enforceable policy, not aspirational language — that the era of systematic import dependency is over. Clear regulatory frameworks, investment protection for domestic food infrastructure, and explicit political commitment to breaking the import dependency cycle are the conditions that will bring private capital into this space. When those conditions exist, the investors will come. The land is there. The opportunity is extraordinary. What has been missing is the political guarantee that the system will not simply recreate the conditions that destroyed domestic production the last time someone tried to build it.
The Ticos demanding that guarantee from their new government are the most important actors in this equation. Not the investors. Not the trade negotiators. The people who eat gallo pinto every morning and deserve to know that the beans in it were grown on Costa Rican land.
SECTION FOUR: The Missing Middle — A Country That Grows Food It Cannot Eat
In Panama, I developed what the Smithsonian Institution recognized as the first closed-loop organic farm in Central America. I have spent more than twenty years traveling this region professionally, reading landscapes for what they produce — or what they no longer do.
When I drive through Costa Rica, something is absent that should not be. The fields are there. The soil is there. The elevation diversity — from the hot lowlands of Guanacaste to the cool highland valleys of Cartago — is extraordinary, the kind of agricultural geography that agronomists study and investors covet. The country has water. It has a labor force with agricultural knowledge. It has infrastructure connecting farms to markets. By every physical measure, Costa Rica should be one of the most productive domestic food systems in the hemisphere.
And yet the food production is nearly invisible.
Not the export crops. Those are everywhere — the pineapple fields of the Northern Plains stretching to the horizon, the banana plantations of Limón covering hundreds of thousands of hectares, the palm oil groves advancing across lowland terrain. That production is visible, organized, and capitalized. It belongs to a system that knows what it is doing and does it efficiently.
What is invisible is the other kind of production. The rice fields. The bean plots. The corn. The vegetable farms that should be supplying the towns and cities with fresh, locally grown food. Thirty years ago they were there. Today you have to look hard to find them, and when you do, they are smaller than they should be, less organized than they could be, and operating under economic conditions that make their continued existence improbable.
Costa Rica did not lose its agricultural capacity. It redirected it. And in that redirection, it left something critical unbuilt — the infrastructure that would have converted what the country grows into what the country eats. That gap is not a footnote to the food sovereignty story. It is the central mechanism of it.
The Reventazón Basin and the French Fry Problem
In the highlands of Cartago province, in the river basin of the Reventazón, sits one of the most productive vegetable-growing zones in Central America. The soil here, enriched by volcanic activity and fed by consistent rainfall, produces potatoes, onions, broccoli, carrots, and a range of highland vegetables that grow nowhere else in the country at comparable scale. According to Costa Rica’s own agricultural data, this basin produces approximately 85% of the country’s domestically grown vegetables and accounts for roughly 73% of national potato output.
Read that again. The Reventazón basin grows nearly all the vegetables Costa Rica produces domestically. It is, by any measure, the vegetable garden of the nation.
And yet Costa Rica imports more than $133 million in frozen and processed vegetables every year.
The country grows the potato. It imports the french fry. It grows the broccoli. It imports the frozen broccoli floret. It grows the carrot. It imports the carrot stick in the resealable bag. At every point where the raw vegetable could be converted into a finished, shelf-ready product — washed, graded, frozen, packaged, branded — the conversion does not happen in Costa Rica. It happens somewhere else. The value created by that conversion goes somewhere else. And Costa Rica pays a premium to import back, in finished form, the product it grew for commodity prices.
Researchers at the University of Costa Rica and agricultural economists at CATIE have documented this processing gap for years. The data is not disputed. The infrastructure gap is not a surprise to anyone working in Costa Rican agricultural policy. What is surprising — and what demands explanation — is that it has persisted for decades without the investment that would close it.
This is not a market failure in the conventional sense. Markets are functioning exactly as they are structured to function. The failure is structural: the freezing plant was never built. The packaging line does not exist. The cold storage network that would allow highland vegetables to reach the GAM’s three and a half million consumers in optimum condition was never developed. Not because the technology is unavailable, not because the demand does not exist — the $133 million in annual imports demonstrates that the demand is very much there — but because building that infrastructure was never made economically attractive, and because the import system that replaced it was.
The Banana That Leaves and the Flour That Arrives
The same pattern repeats in Limón, at a scale that makes the Reventazón example look modest.
The Caribbean lowlands of Limón province produce more than 80% of Costa Rica’s banana exports. The volume is staggering — hundreds of thousands of tons annually, shipped through Port Moín to supermarkets across Europe and North America. It is one of the most efficient agricultural export operations in Central America, organized around large plantation infrastructure, sophisticated logistics, and decades of accumulated expertise in post-harvest handling and cold-chain transport.
Costa Rica is world-class at getting raw bananas to foreign markets.
And then Costa Rica imports banana flour. It imports dried tropical fruit products. It imports cacao-based goods and cassava starch and the value-added derivatives of the tropical crops it ships out raw. The transformation margin — the economic value created by converting a raw banana into banana flour, by fermenting and processing cacao into finished chocolate, by drying and packaging tropical fruit for domestic and regional markets — goes to processors in other countries. Costa Rica provides the raw material. Others capture the value.
The infrastructure to reverse this is not exotic. Banana flour milling is not a technically complex operation. Fruit drying and dehydration equipment is commercially available and relatively affordable at the scale relevant to Costa Rica’s production volumes. Cacao fermentation and processing — the steps that convert raw cacao into marketable chocolate — are well documented and practiced at artisan scale throughout the country already. What does not exist is the commercial-scale, properly capitalized, distribution-connected processing infrastructure that would make this economically rational for the farmers and investors who might otherwise pursue it.
Why does it not exist? For the same reason the Reventazón freezing plant does not exist. Because the system, as structured, does not reward building it. Raw commodity exports and finished product imports are the path of least resistance. Building the missing middle — the processing layer between what grows in the ground and what reaches the consumer — generates friction within a system organized around trade flows in both directions. Building it disrupts those flows. And disrupting those flows costs someone money.
Two Failures, Two Opportunities
Costa Rica faces two parallel and compounding failures, and both are investment opportunities.
The first is a production shortfall. Rice, beans, and corn are simply not being grown in sufficient quantities to feed the country. The land and agricultural labor that once produced them have been redirected toward export crops over three decades of trade liberalization. Emergency bean imports were required in 2024 to prevent domestic shortage. Domestic rice output collapsed by 50% after 2022 tariff reforms. This is not a processing problem. It is a production problem, and it requires a direct solution: planting staple crops on underutilized land, reactivating idle agricultural capacity in regions like Guanacaste and Limón, and rebuilding the domestic food production base that policy dismantled.
73% of black beans, 69% of corn, and 100% of wheat consumed in Costa Rica are imported. These crops are not being grown. Our Tier A investment nodes exist specifically to change that, putting staple food production back on Costa Rican land.
The second failure is a processing gap. For the crops Costa Rica does grow in significant volume, the raw product exists but the infrastructure to convert it into what consumers actually purchase does not. The Reventazón basin grows the vegetables. The freezing plant was never built. The banana farmers of Limón export raw fruit. The value-add processing facility does not exist.
Both failures are investment opportunities. Rebuilding the missing production for staple crops. Building the missing infrastructure for the crops that are already there. Together they form a complete food sovereignty strategy — not either/or, but both.
The Waste That Funds the Import
Costa Rica wastes approximately 40% of its food supply annually. This is not a behavioral statistic — it is not primarily about consumers throwing food away. It is an infrastructure statistic. The majority of food loss in Costa Rica occurs at the post-harvest stage, between the farm and the consumer, because the cold storage, the processing capacity, and the distribution logistics that would preserve that food do not exist at sufficient scale.
A potato that spoils in a field transport truck because there is no cold storage at the regional market represents two failures simultaneously: the value of that potato is lost to the farmer who grew it, and the consumer who needed it must purchase an imported substitute. The system generates waste and dependency at the same point, through the same absence of infrastructure.
Forty percent of a nation’s food supply, lost annually in the gap between farm and table. Meanwhile, more than a billion dollars spent importing food that the country has the land, the climate, and the labor to produce itself. These two numbers, held together, describe the completion problem in its entirety.
The solution is not complicated to describe, though it requires capital and political will to execute. Build the processing infrastructure. Not at one site in the central valley, but regionally — in the Reventazón highland, in the Caribbean lowlands of Limón, in the southern corridor of Pérez Zeledón, in the Guanacaste foothills where staple crop production needs to be restarted from near zero. Connect those regional nodes with a cold chain distribution system that can move finished products to the concentration of consumers in the GAM.
The land is there. The production, partial as it is, already exists as a foundation. The market is demonstrably present — the import statistics prove that Costa Rican consumers will pay for finished food products, and they would pay for domestic ones if domestic ones existed in finished form on the shelf.
What is missing is the political decision to finish what the land already started.
SECTION FIVE: The Body Keeps the Score — What Happens When a Nation Changes What It Eats
I want to tell you something I have observed, not as a statistician or a policy analyst, but as a person who has been coming to Costa Rica for many years.
The people look different than they did twenty years ago.
I do not say this to be unkind. I say it because it is true, it is visible, and it is the kind of observation that statistics confirm but cannot fully convey. Costa Rica was historically a country of lean, active people whose diet was built around rice, beans, fresh vegetables, tropical fruit, and locally produced protein. The traditional Costa Rican diet was not sophisticated by the standards of international cuisine, but it was nutritionally coherent — whole foods, minimally processed, grown nearby, eaten fresh. The bodies it produced reflected that coherence.
What I observe now, walking through San José, through the malls of Escazú, through the markets of provincial towns, is something different. The rate of visible overweight has increased substantially. Children who a generation ago would have been running thin through school yards are heavier. Middle-aged adults carry weight in patterns — abdominal, inflammatory — that are the signature of a specific dietary shift, not simply of aging or prosperity. The change is not subtle to someone who has been watching it accumulate across two decades.
I am not the only one who has noticed. The data confirms what the eye observes. And the data, when you understand where it comes from, is not a surprise. It was predicted. It was published. It was known. And it happened anyway.
The Nutrition Transition: A Predictable Catastrophe
Public health researchers have a name for what Costa Rica is experiencing. They call it the nutrition transition — the shift from traditional dietary patterns based on locally grown whole foods to industrialized food systems dominated by imported, ultra-processed products. It has been studied for decades across Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It follows a consistent and well-documented pattern wherever it occurs.
The sequence goes like this.
A country opens its food markets to international trade. Domestic staple production declines under competitive pressure from subsidized imports. The retail environment fills with packaged, shelf-stable, imported food products that are cheaper per calorie than fresh domestic alternatives, available everywhere, and marketed aggressively. Traditional food preparation knowledge — the cooking practices that turned whole ingredients into nourishing meals — erodes as processed convenience food replaces it. Caloric intake increases while nutritional quality declines. Within one to two decades, rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and metabolic syndrome begin to rise sharply.
This sequence has played out in Mexico following NAFTA. In Chile following its agricultural trade liberalization in the 1990s. In Guatemala, in Honduras, in the Philippines, in South Africa. The researchers who documented these transitions — among them Barry Popkin at the University of North Carolina, whose work on the nutrition transition has been foundational — were publishing their findings in the 1990s and early 2000s. The evidence that agricultural trade liberalization drives dietary industrialization and the health consequences that follow was available and credible before Costa Rica voted on CAFTA-DR in 2007.
In Costa Rica, overweight and obesity rates have more than doubled since CAFTA implementation. Diet-related chronic diseases — type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, metabolic syndrome — are now among the leading drivers of healthcare cost in a country whose public health system was once the envy of the region. The Ministry of Health’s own data tracks the rise. The Costa Rican Social Security Fund, the CCSS, absorbs the cost. The Tico taxpayer pays for it.
Ultra-Processed Food: What It Is and What It Does
There is a term that nutritional science uses with increasing precision: ultra-processed food. It refers not simply to food that has been cooked or preserved, but to food products manufactured from industrial ingredients — refined starches, added sugars, hydrogenated oils, artificial flavors, preservatives, emulsifiers — that bear little structural resemblance to the whole foods from which their components were nominally derived.
Ultra-processed foods are specifically engineered to be consumed in quantities beyond what hunger requires. The combination of refined carbohydrates, added fats, and salt or sugar is calibrated to override the body’s satiety signals. They are designed to be compelling, habit-forming, and difficult to stop eating. This is not an accusation — it is the documented science of food product development, and it is openly discussed within the food industry.
When these products replace traditional whole foods in a population’s diet, the metabolic consequences are measurable and consistent. Blood sugar regulation deteriorates. Inflammatory markers increase. Gut microbiome composition shifts in ways associated with metabolic disease. Weight increases, particularly abdominal fat accumulation, which is specifically associated with cardiovascular and diabetic risk. These outcomes are not the result of personal weakness or lack of discipline. They are the physiological response of human bodies to a food environment that was engineered in a laboratory and optimized for profit rather than nutrition.
Costa Rica’s supermarket shelves are full of these products. Walk through a La Colonia or a Más x Menos and look at what occupies the majority of the floor space — the chips, the cookies, the sweetened beverages, the packaged instant meals, the flavored dairy analogs, the shelf-stable processed meats. Most of it is imported, or manufactured domestically from imported industrial ingredients. Very little of it resembles, nutritionally or structurally, what Costa Ricans were eating thirty years ago.
The shift was not driven by consumer preference in any meaningful sense. It was driven by availability, price, and the systematic dismantling of the alternative.
The Illusion of Choice
It is tempting to frame the dietary shift as a matter of personal responsibility. People choose what they eat. If Costa Ricans are eating more processed food and less traditional food, that is a reflection of their preferences.
This framing is seductive because it is partially true and profoundly misleading.
People eat what the system makes easy. When the price of imported processed food falls below the price of fresh domestic produce because one is subsidized and industrially scaled and the other is not, the choice is not truly free — it is economically constrained. When the traditional food preparation knowledge that converted whole ingredients into daily meals is not transmitted to the next generation because both parents are working in the service economy and there is no longer time for it, the choice is not purely cultural — it is structural. When the marketing budgets of multinational food companies targeting Costa Rican consumers dwarf the resources available for nutritional education and domestic food promotion, the information environment that shapes choice is not neutral.
The people who changed their diet did not do so in a vacuum. They adapted to an environment that was systematically reshaped around them by forces they did not elect and decisions they were not consulted on. The farmer who stopped growing beans because he could not compete with subsidized imports was not consulted. The family that switched from fresh rice and beans cooked at home to packaged instant rice because it was cheaper and faster was not consulted. The child who grew up eating imported ultra-processed snacks because the school canteen was stocked with them rather than local food was not consulted.
The trade agreements that reshaped the food environment were negotiated by officials, ratified by legislators, and implemented by agencies. The people who live with the metabolic consequences of those decisions are the ones who had the least voice in making them.
The Cost That Doesn’t Appear in the Trade Models
Trade agreements are evaluated on economic terms. GDP impact, export volumes, consumer price indices, foreign investment flows. These are the metrics by which CAFTA-DR was assessed when it was proposed, when it was campaigned for, and when it was ratified.
None of the standard trade impact assessments included a projection of the long-term healthcare costs generated by the dietary transition that trade liberalization was known to produce. None of them modeled the CCSS expenditure increase associated with the rise in metabolic disease that the nutrition transition literature, available at the time, consistently predicted. None of them included the productivity loss associated with a working-age population experiencing higher rates of chronic illness than the generation before it.
Costa Rica is approaching the breaking point. The CCSS is under structural fiscal pressure. Chronic disease management is consuming an increasing share of a public health budget that was designed for a healthier population. The cost of the dietary transition is landing, with accumulating force, on a public institution that was built on the premise of a Costa Rica that ate differently than it does now.
That is not a coincidence. It is causation, running from trade policy to food environment to dietary pattern to metabolic outcome to public health expenditure. The chain is documented. The links are established. What remains is the political willingness to acknowledge the chain and act on its implications.
The gallo pinto on the Costa Rican breakfast table is not just a cultural symbol. It is a metabolic prescription. Black beans and rice, eaten together, form a complete protein profile that the human body processes efficiently, sustains energy across a working day, and has been the nutritional foundation of a healthy Tico population for generations. The emergency import of black beans in 2024 was not just a food security failure. It was a public health signal.
When a country cannot reliably produce the food that keeps its people healthy, it has failed at the most basic responsibility of governance. And when that failure is the direct and traceable result of policy decisions that systematically benefited specific interests at the expense of public health, it is not a policy error. It is a dereliction.
SECTION SIX: Sovereignty Is Not a Slogan — What Pura Vida Actually Requires
There is a question that every Costa Rican deserves to sit with, not as an abstraction but as a personal reckoning.
If the brand that defines your country to the world — the brand that fills the hotels, attracts the investment, earns the international respect, and gives you the quiet pride of living somewhere that the world looks at with admiration — if that brand is built on a foundation that your food system actively contradicts, what exactly are you proud of?
This is not a rhetorical attack on Costa Rica or on Ticos. It is the most important question the country can ask itself right now, because the answer determines whether the Pura Vida identity remains a genuine expression of national values or becomes, with each passing year of deepening food import dependency, a marketing slogan for a reality that no longer exists beneath it.
Costa Rica has earned its environmental reputation honestly. The renewable energy achievement is real. The biodiversity conservation is real. The abolition of the military and the redirection of those resources into education and health was a genuine act of national courage that still distinguishes this country in a region where that kind of courage is rare. These are not fabrications. They are the foundation of a legitimate national identity.
But a national identity is not a partial thing. You cannot be the world’s sustainability leader in the domains that are easy to measure and invisible in the domains that are harder to confront. And the food system is the hardest domain to confront, because it implicates daily life, economic relationships, political power, and the gap between what a country says it stands for and what it actually does.
That gap, in Costa Rica’s case, is no longer small enough to ignore.
The Fraudulent Measure
Let us state something plainly that is rarely stated in diplomatic company.
Costa Rica’s sustainability metrics are incomplete to the point of being misleading.
When the country reports 98% renewable electricity generation, that number is real and it is remarkable. But it measures only one dimension of the country’s environmental footprint. It does not measure the carbon cost of importing more than a billion dollars in food annually from the United States — the shipping emissions, the industrial agricultural emissions from the production systems that supply those imports, the cold-chain logistics that move processed food across the hemisphere to reach Costa Rican supermarket shelves.
It does not measure the ecological cost of the pineapple and banana monocultures that replaced the diverse domestic food crop systems — the soil degradation, the pesticide contamination of waterways, the biodiversity loss in agricultural zones that were once more complex and more resilient. Costa Rica uses more pesticides per hectare than almost any country on earth, a consequence of intensive export monoculture agriculture that rarely appears in the environmental reporting that celebrates the renewable energy achievement.
It does not measure the health cost of a food system that has, over thirty years, replaced a traditional whole-food diet with imported ultra-processed products and produced, as a predictable and documented consequence, a population-level metabolic decline that is now straining the public health system.
A country that generates clean electricity while importing its food on diesel-powered container ships, while degrading its agricultural soils with export monoculture chemicals, while absorbing a chronic disease epidemic driven by the processed imports that replaced the food it stopped growing — that country’s sustainability claim is not false. But it is profoundly incomplete.
Incompleteness at scale becomes its own kind of dishonesty. And the Ticos who take genuine pride in their country’s environmental leadership deserve to know the full picture of what that leadership does and does not include.
Sovereignty Is Not Metaphorical
When your government must call for emergency imports of black beans to prevent a shortage of the national dish, it is not making an autonomous decision. It is managing a dependency. The decision about where those beans come from, at what price, on what terms, and with what diplomatic strings attached is not made in San José. It is made by the intersection of global commodity markets, foreign agricultural export interests, and the trade frameworks that govern access — frameworks whose terms were established, as we described in section two, with significant input from the interests that benefit from Costa Rica’s continued dependence.
A government that manages dependency is not governing. It is reacting. Governance — genuine governance, the kind that the Costa Rican constitutional tradition aspires to — requires the capacity to make decisions in the national interest rather than under the constraint of external supply relationships. That capacity begins with food. Food is the floor, and without it the building has no foundation.
This is what food sovereignty actually means. Not self-sufficiency in everything. Not the rejection of international trade. Not an agrarian romanticism that ignores the realities of a modern economy. It means having the productive capacity to ensure that the population can be fed, in crisis and in stability, from domestic resources. It means that the most basic daily act of sustaining human life — eating — is not contingent on the goodwill of foreign exporters, the stability of global shipping lanes, or the diplomatic alignment of trade relationships that can be renegotiated by governments the Costa Rican people did not elect.
That is a reasonable thing for a sovereign nation to demand of its government. It is, in fact, the most basic thing.
The Call to Ticos
I want to speak directly here, not as an analyst or an investor but as someone who has watched this country from the outside for a long time and who believes, genuinely, that Costa Rica is capable of something that most countries are not.
You have already proven that a small nation can make choices that larger, more powerful nations have not had the courage to make. You abolished your military. You protected your forests when the economic incentive was to clear them. You built a healthcare system that serves everyone when the easier path was to serve only those who could pay. These were not small decisions. They were acts of collective will that required your political class to prioritize the long-term national interest over the short-term incentives that pulled in other directions.
The food sovereignty crisis requires the same act of collective will. And it begins not in the legislative assembly but at the breakfast table, at the supermarket, and in how loudly you make your expectations known to the government you just elected.
When you choose to buy the Costa Rican tomato over the imported one, even when it costs a little more, you are making a sovereignty decision. You are sending a market signal that domestic production has value — not just economic value but national value. When you demand to know where your food comes from, you are exercising a form of political accountability that no campaign finance reform can replicate. When you demand from President Fernández and from the Legislative Assembly specific, concrete, measurable commitments to restore Costa Rica’s domestic food production capacity, you are demanding the kind of governance that the Pura Vida brand claims to represent.
The interests that benefit from import dependency will not voluntarily relinquish their position. They never have, anywhere. They yield when the political cost of maintaining that position exceeds the financial benefit of holding it. That political cost is set by you. By whether food sovereignty is a governing priority that the new administration must act on, or an abstract concern that can be safely deferred. By whether Ticos treat the question of what they eat and where it comes from as a political question — which it is — or as a personal one that has nothing to do with governance.
It has everything to do with governance. It always has.
The Brand You Actually Live
There is a version of Pura Vida that is performed for tourists and measured in renewable energy statistics and biodiversity indices and international sustainability rankings.
And there is a version that is lived — in the quality of what Costa Ricans eat, in the health of their children, in the economic wellbeing of farming communities that have been systematically dismantled over three decades, in the capacity of a nation to look at itself honestly and act on what it sees.
The second version is harder. It requires confronting the gap between the brand and the reality. It requires demanding accountability from political figures whose careers have been built on managing that gap rather than closing it. It requires being willing to pay a little more for the domestic tomato, the local bean, the highland vegetable grown in Cartago rather than frozen in Ohio. It requires treating the food system as what it is — a political system, with political authors and political accountability — rather than as a natural phenomenon that simply is what it is.
But the second version is the one that makes the first version true.
A country that eats imported ultra-processed food while its fields lie fallow is not living Pura Vida. It is performing it. And performances, eventually, are recognized for what they are.
What President Fernández Must Do — Now
On February 1, 2026, Costa Ricans elected Laura Fernández Delgado of the Sovereign People’s Party as their president, with a commanding 48.7% first-round victory that gave her both a clear mandate and a legislative majority. She takes office on May 8 as the country’s second female president, having promised in her victory speech “deep and irreversible change” and a new political era.
President Fernández: this article is addressed, in part, directly to you.
Whether the new era you have promised extends to food sovereignty will depend almost entirely on public pressure and on the decisions your administration makes in its first months in office — before policy positions calcify and interests are accommodated. The global context you are inheriting has changed dramatically from the one in which you campaigned. The Iran war has closed the Strait of Hormuz. Fertilizer prices have risen 77% since December 2025. The US agricultural system that supplies the majority of Costa Rica’s imported food is operating at 75% of normal fertilizer supply levels. The food price shock whose full effects will arrive in the second half of your first year is not a future risk. It is an active and accelerating process.
Your documented platform addresses agricultural modernization and market access. That language is ambiguous in a way that this moment does not permit. “Agricultural modernization” can mean building the freezing plant in the Reventazón highlands that should have been built thirty years ago. Or it can mean facilitating more efficient importation of frozen vegetables from abroad. Both can be called modernization. Only one is sovereignty.
What your government must do, specifically and measurably: create regulatory clarity and investment protection for domestic food processing infrastructure. Revise the tariff and quota structures that continue to disadvantage staple crop producers. Implement domestic procurement policies in government institutions, public schools, and the CCSS that create guaranteed demand for domestically produced food. Begin an emergency regional conversation with Central American neighbors about food security cooperation. And commit publicly to a food sovereignty framework that treats domestic food production capacity as a national security asset.
The Trump administration’s trade policy has placed Costa Rica under a 15% baseline tariff on its exports to the United States — higher than most of Latin America. Costa Rica’s export-dependent agricultural sector is being squeezed from outside at the same moment its domestic food production is depleted from within. The case for investing in domestic food production and processing is not only a food sovereignty argument. Under current conditions, it is an economic resilience argument that the market itself is making. You have a legislative majority and a mandate. Use them.
The investors exist. The land exists. The agricultural opportunity is extraordinary. What has been missing is the political guarantee that the system will not recreate the conditions that destroyed domestic production the last time someone tried to build it. Your administration can provide that guarantee. The question is whether it will.
It will not happen on its own. It never does.
SECTION SEVEN: The Producing Nations Hold the Power — Why the Crisis Arriving in Twelve Months Changes Everything
On February 28, 2026 — twenty-seven days after Laura Fernández won Costa Rica’s presidential election — the United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran. Within days, Iran moved to close the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which approximately 20% of the world’s oil and gas, and roughly one third of all global seaborne fertilizer, normally passes. Traffic through the Strait fell from around 130 ships per day before the crisis to single digits in early March — a decline of more than 95%. The head of the International Energy Agency described it as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.
The oil price shock made headlines immediately. What made less noise in the first weeks of the conflict, and what will become the more consequential story over the next twelve months, is what the Strait closure is doing to the world’s fertilizer supply — and what that means for the harvest that feeds the planet in 2027.
Every Costa Rican reading this article should understand the following facts clearly, because they describe the world their country is entering, and they make everything this article has argued about food sovereignty not merely important but urgent in a way that is no longer theoretical.
The Fertilizer Crisis: What Is Actually Happening
Modern industrial agriculture runs on nitrogen. Specifically on urea — the most widely used nitrogen fertilizer in the world, essential for achieving commercially viable yields of rice, corn, wheat, and beans. Without sufficient nitrogen, yields fall. With prolonged nitrogen shortfall, harvests contract. With contracted harvests, food prices rise. With rising food prices, the countries most dependent on food imports — countries like Costa Rica — face the steepest consequences.
Nearly half of the world’s traded urea and large volumes of other fertilizers are exported from Gulf countries via the Strait of Hormuz. That supply is now severely disrupted.
After Qatar’s LNG facilities were attacked, QatarEnergy halted output at the world’s largest urea plant. India cut output from three of its own urea plants as LNG dried up. Bangladesh shut four of its five fertilizer factories. Urea prices surged by approximately 40%, rising from just under $500 to over $700 per metric ton. By mid-March, urea prices had risen 77% from December 2025 levels. Oxford Economics warned that nitrogen fertilizer prices could roughly double from current levels and phosphate prices could climb by about 50%. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted that even if the Iran war stops today, restarting production and transport for fertilizers and their components could take weeks — at a crucial moment for planting.
The timing is catastrophic. Spring planting season in the Northern Hemisphere runs from mid-February to early May. Fertilizer shipments that arrive at US Gulf Coast ports after a thirty to forty-five day journey from the Strait of Hormuz must be ordered by March and applied in April or May. As of mid-March, the US fertilizer supply was at approximately 75% of normal levels. American farmers may shift up to 1.5 million acres from corn to soybeans — a less nitrogen-dependent crop — which will have ripple effects on global food prices through 2026 and into 2027.
And then there is the second threat arriving in the same window.
The Compound Crisis: El Niño on Top of Everything Else
As if the fertilizer shock were not sufficient, climate scientists are now warning of an increasingly likely “super El Niño” developing in the second half of 2026. European climate models indicate elevated probability of a very strong event. For Central America — which sits directly in El Niño’s path — this is not background noise. It is a second simultaneous threat arriving in the same twelve-month window as the fertilizer crisis.
As one senior analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit stated plainly: “Food prices are being squeezed from both sides: by climate extremes disrupting production in major growing regions, and by a food system still hooked on fossil fuels and therefore exposed to spikes in gas, fertiliser, transport and packaging costs.”
For Costa Rica specifically, an El Niño event compounds every vulnerability this article has described. It threatens the highland vegetable production in Cartago that is already unprocessed and undervalued. It threatens the coffee and bean crops of the southern region. It stresses water availability for the lowland tropical agriculture of Guanacaste — precisely the region where staple crop production needs to be rebuilt. A country with robust domestic food production and storage infrastructure can absorb a climate shock. A country that depends on imports for 73% of its beans, 69% of its corn, and 100% of its wheat, with no meaningful strategic reserves, cannot.
This is the compounded vulnerability that thirty years of food sovereignty erosion has created: arriving not one threat at a time, but simultaneously, in the first year of a new government that has not yet articulated an emergency food sovereignty response.
What This Means for Costa Rica Specifically
The imported food on which Costa Rica depends for its staple diet is about to become more expensive. Fuel price increases driven by the oil shock will raise the cost of every shipping container arriving at Puerto Caldera and Puerto Limón. Fertilizer price increases will raise the cost of the agricultural commodities — corn, wheat, soybeans — that Costa Rica imports in finished or semi-processed form. The US agricultural system, Costa Rica’s primary food supplier, is already operating at 75% of normal fertilizer supply in this planting season, which will translate into lower yields and higher prices in the harvest cycle that follows.
The UN World Food Programme estimates that if the conflict persists beyond June 2026, the number of people facing acute hunger globally could increase by 45 million. The sharpest consequences will fall on import-dependent countries unable to absorb higher costs. That description fits Costa Rica precisely.
At the same time, the Trump tariff placing Costa Rica under a 15% baseline export tariff is reducing the foreign exchange earnings that pay for those imports — tightening the fiscal space available to buffer rising food costs precisely when that buffer is most needed. The CCSS, already under structural financial pressure from the chronic disease burden we described in section five, will face rising cost pressures from the inflationary environment the conflict is generating.
This is thirty years of food sovereignty erosion, presenting its bill at the worst possible moment.
The Producing Nations Now Hold the Cards
And yet — here is what the crisis also reveals.
The nations best positioned to buffer the coming fertilizer shock are not the large industrial producers who have maximized synthetic nitrogen dependency. They are the nations with the most diversified crop base, the greatest soil biological activity, and traditional agricultural systems adapted to low-external-input production.
Central America’s traditional agricultural systems — the milpa polyculture of beans and corn, the volcanic soils of the highland vegetable zones, the year-round tropical growing seasons — have exactly those characteristics. Biological nitrogen fixation through legume cultivation. High soil organic matter from volcanic geology. Year-round production that reduces the concentrated seasonal dependency on synthetic inputs that makes temperate monoculture so vulnerable to fertilizer price shocks.
This is not a romantic argument for pre-industrial agriculture. It is a specific and practical observation made more urgent by the current crisis. The global food system is reorganizing around scarcity — of fertilizer, of reliable supply chains, of productive agricultural land in a warming climate. The nations that can grow food, diverse and year-round with reduced synthetic input dependency, hold leverage they were never supposed to exercise.
Central America has that capacity. It has been systematically underinvested, policy-neglected, and structurally discouraged for thirty years. But it exists. And the world’s need for what it can produce is increasing, not decreasing, as the system built on the assumption of permanent Middle Eastern fertilizer supply and stable global shipping lanes demonstrates its fragility in real time.
Central America Must Choose Each Other — Now
Every Central American nation faces this shock simultaneously. The same fertilizer price surge. The same shipping cost inflation. The same pressure on import-dependent food supply chains. The same El Niño threat arriving in the same window.
Seven nations, each individually negotiating these pressures from positions of individual weakness, will fare worse than seven nations that coordinate. A regional emergency food sovereignty framework — preferential trade in staple crops between Central American nations, shared strategic food reserve agreements, coordinated investment in regional processing infrastructure, joint fertilizer purchasing at current prices before further increases — is not idealism. It is the rational response of neighboring nations with shared vulnerabilities and complementary agricultural assets to a crisis that is affecting all of them simultaneously.
The Iran conflict has demonstrated, with perfect clarity, that the global systems on which Central America has been instructed to depend cannot be relied upon. Regional food sovereignty cooperation is the structural shift that reduces that dependence — the same logic that drives investment in renewable energy applies directly to food. Nations that produce their own energy are less exposed to energy shocks. Nations that produce their own food are less exposed to food shocks.
Costa Rica, as the most institutionally credible nation in the region, with the strongest international brand and the most immediate political mandate following Fernández’s February election, is positioned to propose that regional framework. The question is whether the new government understands that the arguments for food sovereignty that seemed important but not urgent six months ago are now urgent in a way that admits no delay.
The producing nations hold the power. They have always held it. The difference between now and thirty years ago is that the system designed to prevent them from exercising it is visibly and dramatically failing.
The land of Central America can grow food. The world needs food. The supply chains that were supposed to make those two facts irrelevant to each other have broken down.
That is not a problem. That is an opening.
SECTION EIGHT: What I Believe Is Possible — A Closing Statement
I want to step back from the data for a moment.
I have written this article from a particular vantage point — as someone who built a closed-loop organic farm in Panama that the Smithsonian Institution brought universities from around the world to study, who has traveled Central America professionally for more than twenty years, and who has skin in the question of whether this region can organize itself around its own interests rather than around the interests of systems designed elsewhere.
I am not a neutral observer. I believe food sovereignty matters. I believe the land of Central America is one of the most extraordinary agricultural assets on earth, and that the people who live on it deserve to benefit from it rather than watch its value flow outward while they import the processed version of what they grow. I believe the structural capture we have described in this article is real, is documented, and is costing the people of this region their health, their economic dignity, and their political independence in ways that are visible if you know how to look for them.
I also believe something that pessimists about this region tend to underestimate: that Costa Rica has, in its history, proven the capacity to make choices that contradict the incentives pointing in the opposite direction. Not once. Repeatedly. The abolition of the military was a choice that defied the logic of its moment. The early commitment to renewable energy was a choice that defied the extractive development model that surrounded it. The conservation of a quarter of the national land area was a choice that defied the short-term economic pressures that push every developing country toward clearing and commodifying its natural assets.
These were not easy choices. They required political leadership willing to absorb costs in the short term for gains that would not be visible for years or decades. They required a public willing to hold that leadership accountable to a long-term vision rather than settling for the path of least resistance. And they worked. They produced the brand, the standing, and the quality of life that distinguish Costa Rica from most of its neighbors and that the world genuinely respects.
The food sovereignty challenge is the same kind of choice. It requires doing the harder thing — rebuilding what was dismantled, building what was never built, confronting the interests that benefit from the current system — rather than the easier thing, which is to continue managing the dependency while performing the brand that contradicts it. It is the kind of choice Costa Rica has made before. It is the kind of choice Costa Rica is capable of making again.
What I Have Seen
I have driven through the cantons of Cartago and seen the highland fields that should be organized, capitalized, and connected to a cold chain that gets their vegetables to San José in optimal condition — instead of selling them raw at farmgate prices to intermediaries. I have driven through Limón and seen the banana plantations that stretch to the horizon — extraordinary productive capacity, all of it flowing outward as raw commodity, none of it staying to feed the communities around it. I have been in supermarkets in San José and noticed, with the specific attention of someone who has spent his working life thinking about food production, that the overwhelming majority of what fills those shelves came from somewhere else — and that the price of that imported food is the price of a dependency that was built deliberately and is being maintained deliberately.
I have also seen the people. I have watched, across two decades, the visible physical change that the section on nutrition described in clinical terms. The people of Costa Rica were not, a generation ago, the population I see today in terms of metabolic health. That change is not subtle to someone watching it accumulate. It is the most visible testimony available to what the policy shift described in this article actually produced — not in agricultural statistics or trade balance data, but in the bodies of the people who live within the system those policies built.
And I have seen something else that the data does not capture: the near-invisibility of food production in a country whose land should be producing food visibly and abundantly. Coming from Panama — where the same pattern is present but where certain forms of smallholder production persist at a scale that makes the agricultural economy legible when you drive through the countryside — entering Costa Rica, the absence of domestic food production is striking in a way that it might not be to someone who has not made the comparison. The fields are there. The soil is there. The climate is extraordinary. What is not there is the system that would turn those assets into food sovereignty rather than export commodity.
That absence is not natural. It was made. And what was made can be remade.
What Investment Can Do — And What It Cannot
Private investment in domestic food processing infrastructure — in the freezing plant in the Reventazón highlands, in the tropical value-add facility in Limón, in the regional processing hub in Pérez Zeledón, in the greenhouse complex in Zarcero — can do something that government cannot do alone: deploy capital at the scale and speed that the food sovereignty challenge requires, with the operational expertise and market orientation that makes the infrastructure economically viable rather than a government project that runs at a loss and closes in a decade.
But capital requires conditions. It requires a policy environment that makes domestic food investment as economically rational as continuing to import. It requires regulatory clarity. It requires a government willing to state, in enforceable terms, that it will not recreate the policy conditions that destroyed domestic production the last time someone tried to build it.
And it requires something more fundamental: a domestic market that demands Costa Rican food. Not out of charity or nationalism, but out of the recognition that buying the domestically produced vegetable, the locally processed bean, the highland-grown dairy product, is an act of sovereignty — personal, economic, and political simultaneously.
What investment cannot do is substitute for the political will of a government and a people. Capital follows conditions. It does not create them. The conditions are created by policy, by public pressure, and by the collective decision of a society about what kind of food system it wants to sustain.
That decision belongs to Ticos.
The Final Argument
Costa Rica does not need to be told it is capable of extraordinary things. It has done them. The evidence is in its renewable energy grid, its national parks, its abolished military, its literacy rate, its public health system, its standing in the world as a small nation that punches above its weight in every domain where it has chosen to compete seriously.
The food system is the domain it has not yet chosen to compete seriously in. It is the domain where the gap between the brand and the reality is widest, where the consequences of that gap are most visible in the bodies and the lives of ordinary Ticos, and where the opportunity for alignment between values and reality is most significant.
Closing that gap requires admitting that it exists. It requires naming the interests that benefit from keeping it open. It requires demanding from the Fernández administration the specific, concrete, enforceable commitments that would make building the missing infrastructure economically rational and politically durable. And it requires each Tico making, in the daily choices available to them — at the market, at the ballot box, in the conversations they have about what their country is and what they want it to become — the decision that sovereignty is not a slogan.
It is a practice. It is something you do every day in the choices you make about how you feed yourself and your family and your nation.
Costa Rica has practiced sovereignty in its energy system. It has practiced sovereignty in its conservation policy. It has practiced sovereignty in its commitment to peace in a region where peace has been rare and costly.
The plate in front of you every morning is waiting for the same commitment.
Pura Vida is not what you say. It is what you grow.
This article is being shared with the incoming Fernández administration, with the Legislative Assembly of Costa Rica, and with agricultural and policy institutions across Central America. The argument has been made. The moment is now. What happens next is a choice.
The author developed what the Smithsonian Institution recognized as the first closed-loop farm in Central America — a fully self-contained, 100% organic agricultural system with complete water recycling and zero waste output. The farm became an international study site, promoted by the Smithsonian to universities whose faculty and students traveled to Panama to study its systems and attend the author’s lectures on sustainable closed-loop food production. The farm has since been sold. The author now works as an advocate for nation-state sovereignty and intentional development through Investor Developments, an international think tank committed to reorienting the direction of indiscriminate development globally. This article reflects more than twenty years of personal observation in Central American agricultural markets, publicly available data, and documented institutional research. Nothing in this article constitutes a legal allegation against any specific individual or entity. Investor Developments has active professional interests in Costa Rica’s food systems and agricultural investment landscape.