 Welcome to Nation Beat. I am General Norville bringing you this brief on the pulse of our nation and highlights around the heart of St. Lucia. St. Lucia's Minister for Agriculture outlined several initiatives to boost the sector against the goals of World Food Day. St. Lucia has captured its first-ever Youth Olympic Games medal and the U.E. forging closer ties with the private sector to instill the entrepreneurial spirit. Our actions, our future, that's the theme under which World Food Day 2018 is being observed and St. Lucia's Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries, Physical Planning, Natural Resources and Corporatives, the Honourable Ezekiel Joseph says it speaks to the many challenges that confront the region given the effects of climate change. In highlighting the government's commitment to agriculture, Minister Joseph, in an address to mark the occasion, indicated that Cabinet had approved the proposed option for the restructured St. Lucia Marketing Board and the St. Lucia Fish Marketing Corporation, among other initiatives that are designed to bring stability, growth and security in agriculture. With the support of the Government of Taiwan, very soon we shall commence a three-year import substitution project. The objective is to reduce the importation of seven vegetables we believe that can be grown on a sustainable basis in St. Lucia, namely tomatoes, sweet pepper, cucumbers, lettuce, cabbages, watermelon and pineapple. We will see very soon the opening of the National Diagnostics Facility at Union, which will be home to two units of the Division of Agriculture and the Meteorological Unit of the St. Lucia Bureau of Standards. According to the Minister, the facility is expected to provide technical and analytical service to agriculture and other major economic and productive sectors. The Ministry of Agriculture is also reviewing the Agriculture Incentives Act with a view to simplify the process. The Ministry will also be focusing on agro-processing and value-added. Encouraging the utilization of locally grown food and forest products will improve the livelihood of participants and increase the demand for their production. In keeping with our area of focus and to contradict the misinformation out there, let it be known that the Government has established agro-processing facilities in Fosso and Angers. We are also supporting many private individuals with the establishment of their own facility by providing capacity building to processors and students at various schools. Despite the numerous challenges, Minister Joseph assured that the Government of St. Lucia remains committed to agriculture. World Food Days celebrated each year on the 16th of October. Main time of food fair held as part of activities for World Food Day 2018 has been deemed a savory success. All roads led to Fodor Heritage Park in Denver as the Agriculture Ministry hosted its annual food fair in observance of World Food Day. A day commissioned by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization also called the FAO to devise affirmative action to sustain global food systems and to tackle global hunger. The day's activities commenced with a cheered service and was followed by the food fair with an action-packed line-up for entertainment. While the global theme for the observance of World Food Day for 2018 is our actions are our future, the organizing team thought it ideal to focus on agro-processing and its importance to the agriculture economy and ultimately St. Lucia's socio-economic development. Speaking at the opening ceremony, Minister with Responsibility for Physical Planning within the Ministry of Agriculture Hon. Harold Stanislas says in recognizing the alarming concerns the world over concerning the access and availability of sustainable food systems, the time is rife for the nation to focus on managing our own food security. Some of the key concerns according to Minister Stanislas is conflict, poverty and climate change. As a matter of priority, this government continues to act with urgent haste to invest in agriculture and food security to help our people thrive and strive. We remain focused as a nation and a region on the realization that we must pay close attention to the deep issues of food security and production as it is vital to our survival and development. Deputy Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture Augustus Cadet inciting the relevance of this year's theme to this time in our national development says agriculture officials continue to work assiduously to ensure healthy, safe and accessible food sources in St. Lucia. We have made some gains, but the need has never been greater for us as a nation to build on these gains, even as we ward off traditional and emerging forces that threaten to erode our gains and stymie our future progress. From the Information Unit of the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries, Physical Planning, Natural Resources and Cooperatives, I am Amanda Feikwok reporting. Now to some fantastic news. St. Lucia has captured its first ever Youth Olympic Games medal as Julian Alfred finished second overall to get silver in the women's 100 meters on Monday in Argentina. The former Leon Hess Comprehensive student, a multiple national record holder and the Commonwealth Youth Games women's 100 meter champion, ran 11.23 seconds in the girls 100 meter finals. St. Lucia is the only English-speaking Caribbean nation, aside from Jamaica, on the medals table. This is Julian Alfred's second historic winning for St. Lucia. Last year, she won the island's first gold medal at the Commonwealth Youth Games. This is Nation Beat. We're back after the break. Everyone is at risk for getting a foodborne illness. While most foodborne illness cases are mild and go unreported, long-term health complications and even deaths can occur from a foodborne illness. Foodborne illnesses are caused by contamination of food at any stage of preparation. If you are a food handler involved in home-based food production, meat, fish, chicken or a big shop, as a food vendor, how you prepare food can put your customers at risk. Do you know the risks and how to avoid them? The St. Lucia Bureau of Standards can help you. For more information, contact the St. Lucia Bureau of Standards at 456-0546 or email SLBS at candw.lc or visit the website at www.slbs.org.lc. St. Lucia Bureau of Standards, making quality and standards our way of life. Welcome back. The University of the West Indies, the UAE, plans on closer aligning itself with the private sector through the promotion of entrepreneurship, innovation and technology. Vice Chancellor of the UAE, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, says boosting the region's economy is a prerogative of the institution. Getting our economies out of the gutter and back on the highway is our top priority. That is our top priority. If we don't get 3-4-5% growth across this region in the next five years, we are going to be losing many of the benefits that we have achieved in the 20th century. So we have to get 3-4-5% growth consistently across this region in the next decade. The University has a critical role to do this. The only way this is going to happen, that growth trajectory we are looking for, is if we identify and promote new drivers in the economy. Identify new sectors, new industries, new value-added streams. The University has a very important role to play in innovation and commercializing the research that we have in the University right now to create those new sectors. To realize the vision, the University has established an innovation committee with the private sector organization of Jamaica. Professor Denzil Williams is a Pro Vice Chancellor of the UAE. But also a significant number of our professors within the University are already doing that sort of alignment. We have Deputy Principal here from Cavill Campus. Significant work with Sargassum Weed is taking place there at Blackbelly sheep and it's used in making leather goods and stuff. In Mona, for example, we have professors who have gone on, as you know, ginger. One of the problems that we have in Jamaica is the soil that we actually plant or ginger in. There is a thing called the rhizome disease. We have professors who have no found solution to those. So we have a professor there who is doing serious tissue culture work in creating a new breed of ginger that is not going to be used by the Scientific Research Council to spread right across the entire landscape in terms of planting ginger. The University will soon announce plans for the launch of a major industry partnership symposium to take place early next year. The first regional finance initiative on nationally determined contributions on climate change ended in St. Lucia last week with a declaration on ambitions for implementation and climate leadership in the Caribbean. The NDC Finance Initiative is an open regional platform and a process for partnerships on project pipeline development, matchmaking with potential investors, and a technical support for infrastructure projects that advance and accelerate the implementation of nationally determined contributions or NDCs and inform on a roadmap for their implementation and financing until 2020. The declaration, while welcoming contributions by the various development partners to the NDCFI, urged the international development community to continue and urgently scale up financial and technical support for climate change action in the OECS region and the wider Caribbean community. It has been determined that the target of raising $100 billion in finance each year by 2020 for climate related projects in developing nations must be met. It has been indicated that even if developed countries are successful in sourcing the $100 billion by 2020, this just might not be enough to address the full cost of low emission climate resilient development in developing countries, given the increasing severity of climate impacts. The declaration coming out of the NDC Finance Initiative also affirms that there remain significant policy, legislative and institutional barriers to effective climate change action and NDC implementation in the OECS member states as well as the difficulty in accessing most sources of international climate finance. This is not about piecemeal initiatives, you know, a single electric car on the road and we make a big hullabaloo about it or make changing a few light bulbs here from incandescent to lead. It requires that we see the opportunities for making the transformational shift from where we are to a different type of future that carries cross functional opportunities in it. Germany's ambassador to CARICOM has Excellency Holger Michael announced the support of his government in providing additional funding for NDC's implementation in the Caribbean. It gives me a great pleasure to officially announce today that German cooperation will assist the implementation of this initiative with a further financing of 500,000 euros. The NDC Finance Initiative had as its theme Caribbean climate leadership accelerating NDC implementation. The forum built on outcomes of a regional dialogue on nationally determined contributions for the Caribbean, co-organized by the UN Development Programme UNDP and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the UNFCCC executed days before. From the Communications Unit of the Ministry of Education, Innovation, Gender Relations and Sustainable Development, I am Chris Satney reporting. Celebrations for the Goa Fet Margaret or the La Margaret Festival will take place Wednesday, 17 October. Two main events are planned. The school's church service is scheduled for the St. Joseph the Worker Roman Catholic Church at 10 am. Participating schools will then parade the streets of Grosjele before returning to their respective schools. The church service for the adult groups takes place at the church of St. Michael in Dennery from 10 am. The groups break for lunch at 12 midday and commence their group presentations from 2 pm at the Larisius playing field. Be sure to join them. That's a nation beat. Join us next time on NTN at 7.30 pm with a repeat at 7.30 am and on this station as we fill the pulse and heart of our community. You can also catch up with us anytime on the St. Lucia Government Facebook page or YouTube channel. I am Janelle Norville.