 The Agriculture Ministry in collaboration with the FAO Mexico Caricum Initiative, Cooperation on Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience in the Caribbean, has carried out a health assessment of students currently enrolled in the National School Feeding Program, with the goal of generating an insightful description of school meals provided in the program and students' health needs in order to assess the level of congruence between them. The nutrition consultant, attached to the project, Euphalia Filgens, explains that with global trends indicating that an increasing number of young people are developing many non-communicable diseases as a result of the food they consume. This initiative aims to ensure that the food offered to students through the program is healthy and nourishing. So we wanted to ensure that our students that whatever we are creating, the menu that we are creating is suitable and meeting the needs of our students. It's not just a menu that we just put from our head, but a menu that meets the needs of whether our students have any communicable diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, the menu can still meet their needs. And I think we achieved that goal. So when we went to the different schools, we took the students' blood pressure, they hide their weight, we also took their pulse and also their blood sugar level, their glucose level. Highlighting the importance of children to St Lucia's future, Chief Agri-Enterprise Development Officer of the Ministry of Agriculture Thaddeus Constantine says the food and nutrition issues faced in St Lucia require a multidisciplinary approach and measures that are a composite of policy, legislative and institutional action. We wanted to ensure that within the school feeding program, the work that we do would be able to address some of these challenges and also to ensure that the students would be provided with the best opportunities to learn. So to ensure that the menus were properly formulated, we conducted this health assessment and this health assessment now will inform what are the ingredients to be put into the menus as we go ahead with the school feeding program. This assessment should be continued, it should be repeated annually and it should be extended to also the secondary schools so that we get a good clarification of the health of our students because if a student is not fed properly, he will not be able to learn for that day. Everyday loss cannot be regained. Approximately 7,000 students are currently being served by the national school feeding program. As the agriculture ministry continues to unpack its plans for improving food and nutrition security in the coming months, the focus will remain on the students ensuring their proper nutrition through access to healthy meals. From the communications unit of the Ministry of Agriculture, I am Manisha Antoine reporting.