Regional Producers to Discuss Achieving 25 by 25 goals During Food for Lunch Webinar on Friday
The third Food for Lunch Webinar on CARICOM’s 25 by 2025 initiative will be held virtually on Friday, 17 November 2023 at 12:30 pm.
On Friday, a four-member panel will discuss ‘Regional Producers’ Advancements Towards Achieving 25 by 2025′.
The panel will feature Fiona Perkins of Las’N Foods; Dunston Demille of the Caribbean AgriBusiness Association (CABA); Errington Thompson of the Agriculture Alliance of the Caribbean (AACARI) and Chenille Humes, of the Youth Advisory Body of Jamaica. Riyad Mohammed of Tropical Agriculture Consultancy Services will moderate the session. The conversation will be live-streamed on Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn and CARICOM Today. To participate, please register at https://bit.ly/469K1V0
The Food for Lunch conversations, launched in April, are aimed at highlighting the 25 by 2025 initiative through engagements with the wider community. President of Guyana, His Excellency Mohamed Irfaan Ali, lead head of government with responsibility for agriculture in the CARICOM Quasi Cabinet, is piloting the initiative which aims to reduce the Region’s high food import bill by 25 per cent by 2025.
The first lunchtime conversation featured David Fernandes, Assistant Managing Director, Bounty Farms Limited; Stephen Crell, Managing Director, Republic Bank Limited; Ralph Birkhoff, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer, Alquimi Renewables LLC and Teesha Mangra-Singh, Chief Executive Officer, One Guyana Agriculture Inc. Amb. David Prendergast, Director, Sectoral Programmes, CARICOM Secretariat, moderated that programme.
Panelists for the second discussion were Servulo Baeza, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, Belize; Terry Bascombe, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, Barbados; Miguel Flemming, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, St. Kitts and Nevis; and Dr. Henry Canton, Executive Director, Silk Grass Farms. Jerad Darville, Consultant, The Bahamas Agricultural and Industrial Cooperation moderated the session. Discussions focused on what the initiative means to Caribbean citizens and among the topics the panel explored in the robust session was the role of genetically modified organisms in the Region’s food production system. The discussion was captured in an article published in the 2023 Caribbean Week of Agriculture e-magazine.
Source: CARICOM TODAY