 Embracing this year's theme for World Food Day 2022, Leave No One Behind, the Agriculture Ministry's recently hosted CMOS Fiesta brought together many sector partners to highlight a locally grown product that can help improve St. Lucia's food security. Recognizing that food security is a global priority, country representative for the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute Cardi, Barry Innocent, says his organization remains committed to assisting in the fight for food security because the health, stability and well-being of a country is dependent on the food security that is built together. Food in itself is a very important commodity. I mean the human body on normal circumstances eat about three times a day and that is an important part of our daily lives. So it is worthy of the attention given to it to ensure that the public is aware of food security, the agencies responsible and stakeholders responsible are aware of it and they can all work together to the good of national food security and food nutrition. The potential of the CMOS is very far and wide. I mean they are very the very nutritive content of CMOS the zinc which is good for your immunity and also for men is good for men and there are many other very important nutrients or nutritive value of CMOS. So it's a wonderful industry and it can go from cosmetics into soaps and creams to culinary in terms of there's a CMOS cake, cheese cake, bread a lot of things can be done. So it's very valuable and I'm glad that all the stakeholders around today are looking at different aspects of it but I'm hoping that there can even be more development of more value chain addition into the CMOS production. While acknowledging the strides and progress made toward achieving sustainable development goal one of ending world hunger permanent secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture Barry Morphelisier emphasized that there are still significant disparities in food supplies access to food and food affordability. According to him the agriculture ministry's goal is to ensure that the entire nation has a safety net in place to guarantee that there is adequate food available to live a healthy life. The ministry has been strategic in its approach you would have realized generally that we are trying to increase local demand and reduce on the food import bill earlier in the year we had banana festival in terms of seeing what can be done with the fruit innovatively so you would have seen products like banana cake banana paper and the like then we went to our mango festival and the same was done inclusive of catalogs both of these products and of course now CMOS CMOS is doing quite well economically in St Lucia I've regained this year over seven million dollars so it is important to focus on CMOS promote CMOS especially quality CMOS in keeping with the standards that is expected for us to export CMOS at this time so CMOS is big for St Lucia and we want to ensure that it remains in focus and on the table. In the midst of a deteriorating global food security crisis and an all-time high number of people at risk of experiencing severe hunger Mr Felicia believes that in order to increase St Lucia's food security the public must continue to support local production by purchasing local produce and adopting a healthy lifestyle. From the communications unit of the Ministry of Agriculture I am Anicia Andron reporting