 150 school cooks from across the island have received training in food safety and quality over a seven-week period, all in an effort to strengthen the school-feeding program nationally. The training forms part of efforts of the Mexico Caricum FAO Initiative, Cooperation for Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience in the Caribbean, admitting its mandate of increasing the resilience of Caribbean countries, improving the livelihoods and well-being of families and communities, and providing access to healthy food. Nutrition consultant on the National School-Feeding Project, Euthalia Filgent, explains that the training sessions were aimed at educating participants on how to cook healthy alternative meals for the children in the school-feeding program. Right now they usually have a diet based on flour and rice and so on, but now we are asking them to try to use what we have locally grown. So this is what we're doing, so we're cooking locally grown foods in different ways to ensure that the students can get a healthy meal. So it shows variety, color, texture and we're hoping that it will be appealing to the children. So far we've done seven districts and this is the last district we're doing. We started from district eight and we're on district one now. So all of the cooks are getting the same type of training and the training will try to ensure that they have options, like a menu option. So they'll be provided with menus, recipes so that they can continue what they've taught and we hope that it will be sustainable. So that's why we're ensuring that they get the training to do the specific dishes and also that they will be able to have a reference so they will get the recipe book and also their menu. National Project Coordinator of the Food and Agriculture Organization School-Feeding Program, Cherian Smith, in expressing gratitude to all stakeholders involved in ensuring the training's successful completion, says this initiative directly contributes toward achieving sustainable development goal two, which is aimed at ending hunger, achieving food security, improving nutrition and promoting sustainable agriculture. So basically the whole aim of this project is to strengthen the School-Feeding Program. We're looking at activities that would improve livelihoods, especially the livelihoods of the children. So we're not only looking at the training of the cooks but added to that we have activities that involves the school kitchens, the school gardens. We're looking at rehabilitations of school kitchens, rehabilitations of gardens and basically we want to incorporate the gardens and the School-Feeding Program to have sort of a one union. So this is why we're basically here today. I'm very happy to be a part of this journey and on behalf of the FAO, I'd like to thank the people in the government of Mexico for the help that they've provided us with. I'm hoping that the training can go a very long way. I'm hoping that the training that the cooks receive we can start to see the changes in the kitchen. Although the training has been completed, the project coordinator confirms that the FAO is now focusing on rehabilitating school kitchens and working with technical officers in the Ministry of Agriculture to create a farmer's school manual. From the communications unit of the Ministry of Agriculture, I am Anisia Antoine reporting.