Food and Nutrition Security Policy and Action Plan

The Food and Nutrition Security Policy and Action Plan is a national cross-sectoral Policy of Saint Lucia for the period 2014-2024. Its main goal is to contribute to ensuring long-term food and nutrition security and the enjoyment by all of the right to food in Saint Lucia.
According to the document, this general goal will be pursued through the following four specific food security and nutrition objectives that simultaneously increases agricultural and rural development and reduce poverty: strengthen agricultural production, marketing systems and enterprises including strengthening institutional capacity to support their development; improve the capacity of policy and programme frameworks for managing key challenges to food and nutrition security; promote the consumption of safe and nutritious food; and ensure stability of food supplies.
More specifically, in the area of food availability, it provides for promotion of increased availability of locally produced, safe, quality nutritious food at remunerative market prices so as to increase production, productivity and returns to farmers through agricultural innovation; removal of non-tariff barriers to trade to decrease marketing costs and facilitate access to and distribution of food; and development of strategies to address national transportation so as to reduce distribution costs and improve the movement of food commodities throughout the island and region.
In the field of food access, the Policy plans to establish programmes to help rural farming households diversify away from direct production of food commodities to becoming agribusiness entrepreneurs dealing with non-food and high value commodities, non-farm agricultural enterprises, especially in the value-addition processing industries, and non-agricultural rural enterprises such as cultural/agro-tourism, forestry and services.
For food utilization/nutritional adequacy, the document prioritizes promotion of healthy Caribbean diets and optimal nutrition, making maximum use of locally grown, nutritious foods to reduce significantly the incidence of non-communicable diseases such as hypertension, diabetes and heart failure, and the prevalence of obesity and malnutrition, especially targeting children and adolescents.
The Policy also contains language on stability of food supply aiming to strengthen capacity to deal effectively with emergency conditions and minimise their negative short- and long-term impacts on food security and nutrition, especially among food-insecure households and those most vulnerable to food insecurity; and establish a National Food and Nutrition Security Information System to effectively forecast, plan and monitor basic food supplies, nutrition conditions, intra- and inter-regional food trade and identify the food insecure and those vulnerable to food insecurity.
It also contains climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies aiming to identify and address emerging food and nutrition security issues, particularly as these threaten the food security and nutrition status of the most vulnerable, disadvantaged and marginalised households and population groups.
The implementation of the Policy will be monitored by the broad-based National Food and Nutrition Security Advisory Council/Committee. The Committee reports to the Cabinet of Ministers through the Minister of Agriculture as deemed necessary and conducts a public review of this Policy to determine its effectiveness in achieving its goals.