Hawai'i Island's Agri-food Economic Cluster

For Hawai'i Island to improve food security and self-sufficiency, it is important to understand the linkages between the agriculture and food segments of the island economy and treat them as a combined cluster. Even though there are agricultural products that are produced locally but exported off island and there are agricultural products that are not food items, combining these sectors into a single economic cluster enables a more holistic analysis of how to increase local consumption of locally produced food products.

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Clustering data in this way overcomes the limitations of standard industry classifications codes contained in the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), by which most economic data is usually categorized. Using NAICS classifications, agriculture is limited to production activities without including other aspects of the sector. Food sectors are buried in more than one category, making them difficult to track. To overcome these limitations, microdata from the Your Economy Time Series Database (YTS) was obtained to enable jobs and establishments data to be clustered in ways that more accurately reflect the island's agricultural value chains. DataAxle is the provider of the Licensed Database used to create the Your Economy Time Series (YTS). This work/research was authorized to use YTS through the Business Dynamics Research Consortium (BDRC) by the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Business and Entrepreneurship. The contents of the graphs and summaries of this data are solely the responsibility of HIAP and the Hamakua Institute.

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The pie charts below demonstrate the comparisons between categorizing jobs by NAICS codes on the left and using clustered data on the right. The combined cluster provides a more useful and accurate understanding of the economic importance of this cluster to the island economy.