Barbados and other Caribbean countries must link agriculture to nutrition as its first step in addressing food and nutrition security.
This was the advice from Professor Chandra Madramootoo, agricultural expert and dean in the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, McGill University, Quebec, Canada, as he addressed the opening ceremony for the National Seminar On Food And Nutrition Security in Barbados at the Solution Centre, University of the West Indies’ Cave Hill Campus.
Madramootoo said the Caribbean could talk about agriculture and food security without including nutrition security because of the problems countries in the region faced with non-communicable diseases.
“If we can put those elements into our nutrition strategy and then into our food-production and food-security strategies, we will reduce our health care bill significantly by hundreds and millions and focus can then be placed on food security,” he said. (AH)
