 The Ministry of Agriculture joins the United Nations in celebrating the International Year of Plant Health 2020, more from Anisea Antoine. The Research and Development Unit of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Physical Planning, Natural Resources and Cooperatives, hosted a tree planting ceremony in an effort to promote actions which protect plant health and to raise awareness on how protecting plant health can save God lives, the environment and boost economic development. The Acting Minister for Agriculture, Honourable Harold Stanislaus, urged the public to ensure that plants being imported to St. Lucia meet phytosanitary requirements to help reduce the spread of plant pests and diseases. The urgent reality is that plant health is increasingly under threat. Climate change and human activities has altered ecosystems, reducing biodiversity and creating new niches where pests can thrive. At the same time, international travel and trade has tripled in volume in the last decade and can quickly spread pests and diseases around the world causing great damage to native plants and the environment. Colleagues, protecting plants from pests and diseases is far more cost-effective than dealing with full-blown plant health emergencies. The Caribbean Agriculture Research and Development Institute, CARDI, has been working closely with the Ministry of Agriculture in educating industry stakeholders on the measures that should be adopted to ensure that the safety of food production is sustained. CARDI's representatives of St Lucia, Andrea Vera, highlighted the importance of initiatives such as the tree planting ceremony. I want us to think for a moment about the situation globally with COVID-19 and think about this from an angle of plants. So we have a disease that is affecting our human race throughout the world. What if we had a disease that was affecting all of our crops so that they're dying off? What's going to happen to us in terms of food? And if you think about that for a minute, it brings home the importance of food security and ensuring that we take care of our plants, pest and disease management, integrated pest management approaches, agricultural approaches, our quarantine procedures, the health and safety of trans movement of crops and plant materials throughout the region and throughout all of our countries. We bring things into St Lucia. We need to ensure that all of these things are safe and protected because we don't want our food industry to be severely affected to the point where we cannot feed our people. And therein lies the very importance of international plant health and all of the measures that we as the Ministry of Agriculture in the region, in St Lucia, the agencies like CARDI, ICAR, the FAO, all come into play to ensure that we teach persons and we educate persons on the measures and practices that should be used and adapted to ensure that safety of our food production industry is sustained. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that up to 40 percent of food crops are lost due to plant pests and diseases annually. From the Information Unit at the Ministry of Agriculture, I am Anisha Antoine reporting.