 With the limelight being placed on the pressing challenges of food insecurity and climate change in the Caribbean region, a meeting was convened at the headquarters of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, ICA, in Costa Rica, to bring together agricultural ministers across the Caribbean, aiming to strategize a comprehensive roadmap for the region's agricultural future. During the official visit, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries Food Security and Rural Development Honourable Alfred Prospect, had the opportunity to visit the Tropical Agriculture Research and Higher Education Centre, CARTIA, which engages in research work and training, using a model linked to finding solutions to existing problems in the agriculture sector. Recognizing the importance of building resilience and sustainability in the sector, ICA representative in the Eastern Caribbean states, Greg Rawlins, expresses hope that this meeting will lead to the establishment of an agreement between the Ministry of Agriculture and CARTIA, allowing for St. Lucia to benefit from some of the expertise and models they have to offer. They would have visited the Cocoa Germplasm Bank that is at CARTIA, it's the second largest outside of Trinidad and Tobago. They would have seen the coffee Germplasm Bank as well. They have a lot of, I think it's the fourth largest in the world in terms of coffee varieties. They have significant propagation facilities for coffee as well, that is supplied to farmers. We would have also visited the Silver Pastoral Systems, where they adopt combination of grass and trees for species and so on to produce dairy cattle and achieve very high yields, very high productivity. Utilizing obviously forages and grasses. We also would have observed systems of small ruminant production, dairy goats, and using the waste from the dairy goats as an integrated manner towards a regenerative type of circular type of production system, so that we would have seen a lot of these systems that Costa Rica has that are based on sustainability. Honourable Alfred Prosper also had the opportunity to observe firsthand the research being done at CARTIA to incorporate resistant varieties of bananas, addressing the escalating threat of the tropical race for TR4 disease, which poses a significant risk to the vital banana sector in St. Lucia and the entire Caribbean. Minister Prosper expressed contentment at the potential benefits as there are continued efforts to develop TR4 resistant, Cavendish banana varieties. We also visited an area where they are doing work on TR4 tropical race diseases and the tropical race disease, they are very concerned about that because they also have lots of bananas and the family Cavendish is susceptible to the TR4. So they are already doing work in terms of using as pieces of bananas from Brazil that is resistant to TR4 and they are trying to see how they can breed the two. So the Cavendish, which is very vulnerable to it, which is the TR4, they can probably develop a new variety that will be resistant to the TR4. And that is important for us because in Australia, in Colombia, in all the parts of Asia, the TR4 is spreading rapidly and we have the TR4 now in Peru and Venezuela. Like you think about Venezuela, Venezuela is very close to Trinidad and you have lots of movements of visitors to and from those two countries. As a dedicated partner in this endeavour of achieving food and nutrition security in the region, the Ministry of Agriculture is resolute in playing a pivotal role in the region's collective efforts towards building a more resilient and sustainable future for Caribbean agriculture. From the communications unit of the Ministry of Agriculture, I am Anicia Antoine reporting.