(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) Caribbean and Latin American stakeholders in the agriculture sector on Thursday morning buckled down to three days of discussions that are aimed at reducing malnutrition and advancing action to ensure the region is food and nutrition secure.

The tone of the discussions at the Sixth Working Group Meeting of Latin America and Caribbean Initiative held in Georgetown, Guyana, was set by His Excellency Donald Ramotar, President of Guyana and lead Head of Government with responsibility for Agriculture in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Quasi Cabinet.

Acknowledging that the Region was an agriculture-rich one, with an abundance of food, President Ramotar said it was unacceptable that more than 50 million people “go to bed hungry each day in this Region”.

“We must act urgently to end this,” he told the gathering at the opening ceremony at the Guyana International Conference Centre, Georgetown.

In moving towards the “realistic and achievable” goal of eradication of hunger and malnutrition, the President said that there was need for the hastening and deepening of integration of the Caribbean and Latin America so that a pooling of resources could occur towards “feeding our people”.

Poverty, he said, remained one of the biggest issues in the Region, but in the face of the successes achieved so far, “we can never be satisfied unless poverty and malnourishment are totally eradicated from our Region”.

Stressing the need for concerted action on different fronts and platforms to address the problem of hunger and malnutrition which were directly linked to the levels of poverty and inequality in Latin American and the Caribbean, the President called for greater priority attention to these issues in national, regional and international policies.

The Region of Latin America and the Caribbean, he told the meeting, had long been characterised by pervasive inequality and unacceptable levels of poverty. In fact, the Region was one of the most unequal in the world and it was this inequality that spawned hunger, poverty and malnutrition, he pointed out.

The thrust of the meeting is primarily to further strengthen governance arrangements for food security at the regional and global levels. The Meeting will also address the steps taken at national and sub-regional levels to achieve food and nutrition security (FNS) in the Region. Hunger Free Latin America and the Caribbean Initiative is a commitment from countries and organizations in the region, supported by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), to help create the conditions to eradicate hunger permanently by 2025. The Initiative was born during the Latin American Conference on Chronic Hunger, held in Guatemala in 2005, and has the ambitious, specific goal of reducing the incidence of chronic malnutrition in children below 2.5 per cent in all countries of the region by 2025. The meeting concludes on Saturday.