GEORGETOWN, Guyana – Guyana has lamented the absence of health, education and technology from the Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) mission to increase food production and eat healthy.
President Ali addressing CELAC high level Agriculture Ministers meetingAddressing the opening ceremony of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) high-level Ministers of Agriculture meeting, President Irfaan Ali said studies show that the cost of a healthy diet is very expensive in the Caribbean and Latin America.
“Something is wrong so we have to look at this matter in a comprehensive manner. The existing framework is not working. Whatever we are doing at this moment has given the people of our region the highest cost for a health diet,” Ali told the event being attended by delegates from 33 Latin America and the Caribbean countries addressing the region’s food and nutrition security issues.
Ali, who has lead responsibility for food security in the quasi-CARICOM cabinet, was critical of some unnamed Caribbean food distributors for importing “junk” food into the region and the sale of almost expired products at low prices.
“In the CARICOM region, we know why because the distributors do not want to disrupt their business arrangement and find it easier to import all the junk that you can find from outside of the region,” he said, saying that among the solutions was CARICOM turning to Brazil for large-scale food supply while the region builds up its capacity.
Ali said statistics show that between 2019 and 2021, the number of hungry people increased by 13.2 million, the prevalence of hunger was 7.9 per cent in South America and 18. 4 per cent in the Caribbean.
“Sometimes, we are of the mistaken view in CARICOM that all is well,” he said, noting that the moderate food insecurity in Latin America and the Caribbean was higher than the global average and the highest cost of a healthy diet.
He said he intends to take the decisions of the CELAC meeting here to the next week’s CARICOM summit in Trinidad.
He told the ceremony that he wants the CELAC meeting to highlight all the trade deficiencies i that prevent people from access cheaper food and better nutrition with linkages to poverty and inequality reduction,
He urged the ministers to outline the role of the health sector in food security as that might not have been done before.
“If we don’t have a health sector that understands the linkage between food production and food security and what they do, then we’ll have a mismatch. We will not have an alignment of policies,” he said, citing the need for the health sector to make “structural changes” in the way they approach nutrition so that there could be success in addressing food and nutrition policies.
Ali said every effort must be made to tackle food production and food security from a health perspective rather than waiting until the “first hospital visit” which eats into potential health savings from investment in nutrition.
He said there needed to be a changed mindset that nutrition is for sick people or persons 35 years and older.
“That is the culture in the region. We bring our children up, we allow them to eat whatever they want- ‘oh! they are small kids, let them enjoy themselves but if you are speaking about nutrition for the collective whole, you have to speak about nutrition for the population,” he said, recommending a target approach on nutrition for segments of the entire population.
He also urged the conference to recommend policy action for the education sector in the Caribbean and Central America be involved in building nutrition change from nursery to university, saying “if we educate the children and they become the custodian of good eating habits, then we’ll be saving in the long-term in terms of the health care costs”.
Ali said sometimes agriculture and food security do not get the “right policy space” because they are regarded by some as unimportant.
In the area of technology, he challenged universities and experts to develop a centralized research system and apply the right technology such as ecological support systems to increase food production and become resilient.
