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Contact:
Rose Marie Harris
Wednesday, September 29, 2004 – After a two year tour of duty of Saint
Lucia and the Caribbean, Sub-regional representative of the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) for the Caribbean, Dr. Winston Rudder believes that Caribbean
people must pay greater attention to the intricate link between agricultural
food production and health and education.
Dr. Rudder, who was in St. Lucia on September 29 to bid farewell to the
Government of Saint Lucia and officials of the Ministry of Agriculture,
explained the FAO’s involvement here in a number of areas: “More recently a key
endeavour has to do with food security. St. Lucia, is part of a regional project
dubbed the “CARIFORUM Food Security Project”, in which we seek to enhance the
capacity within individual countries to deal with the food production, using
appropriate technology and getting the farmers more involved and organised.”
Two other aspects to that initiative have to do with improving the marketing and
information aspect. “It is one thing to produce food, but the other thing is to
get it to market and to know which markets are more appropriate for the food
that is produced. The third aspect, which is increasingly important in the
context of Caribbean development, is to see how one can link more closely,
agricultural food production with health and education”, Dr. Rudder said.
Explaining further, Dr. Rudder pointed out that what they are finding out is
that it is not sufficient to find food to fill the stomach. He said that there
must be a focus on food quality, food safety, the right types of food, because
increasingly, “as we seek to deal with the issue of hunger and poverty, there is
another side of the coin, and that is, even when people are getting enough food,
they are not consuming the correct foods, and what we are seeing are patterns of
health problems developing, such as non-communicable diseases”, citing these as
obesity, heart, diabetes and certain forms of cancer. These he said are directly
related to the quality of food that people eat and the lack of balance in their
diet. “So we are concerned about relating food production policy to health
policy, to nutrition policy, and much more integrated involvement of agriculture
into the overall development of the country.”
Dr. Rudder’s employment with the FAO comes to an end on October 31st, 2004.
While on island, Dr. Rudder met with Agriculture officials and the Permanent
Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs, Mr. Cosmos Richardson.
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