The Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) is pleased to join the CARICOM Secretariat, FAO, CARDI and Alliance Partners in hosting the Caribbean Week of Agriculture (CWA) under the theme “Accelerating Vision 25 by 2025”. I recognize and thank the Government of The Bahamas as our host country to this year’s CWA and I am personally grateful to Minister Sweeting for his support in making this happen.

The 17th CWA serves as an incredible opportunity for the Caribbean Region to build bridges and opportunities with rest of the world, and to forge and foster strategic partnerships so critical for the Region at this time. Today we face unprecedented global challenges and threats to our food systems. Global tragedies – from the COVID-19 pandemic, climate-related phenomena, to the war in Ukraine have elevated IICA’s in work in food and nutrition security to the highest urgency and priority.

IICA appreciates that this 17th CWA will bring together relevant stakeholders in the agri-food sector and give us a unique opportunity to share our knowledge and experience with each other and network so we can collectively work together to address our regional food and nutrition challenges and priorities. On the policy front, IICA looks forward to the CARICOM Heads of Government meetings and the Special Ministerial Task Force and playing our key role in implementing their critical recommendations and game-changing decisions in the rural, agricultural, and environmental sectors. As Director General, I rely on proceedings of these high-level meetings to formulate IICA’s priorities in the Region.

IICA and my personal commitment to our Member States in the Region remain strong and unwavering. IICA is serious in our duty to deliver meaningful technical assistance on the ground and for that reason we continue to support and maintain 14 national Delegations with a highly qualified multidisciplinary contingent of technical specialists and staff. IICA’s internal resource allocation to the Caribbean has increased by more than 33% in this year and our execution of Regional technical programmes with external resources has increased by more than 258% in the last 3 years. Our success is not achieved alone, and I am grateful to the national authorities, regional agencies, donor agencies and our other strategic partners helping us deliver this success for the Caribbean Region.

IICA will continually strive for more achievements in agribusiness and trade, agricultural health and food safety, export readiness, and trade promotion. We know well that the effects of climate adversely and inversely strike this Region greater than most. So, we are mobilizing efforts to manage production risks and build resilience to climate change. We are implementing our living soils initiative in collaboration with World Food Prize Laureate Professor Rattan Lal of Ohio State University. Under the scope of this initiative, we have established a water and agriculture network due to the critical importance of this thematic area. Clean seed production and the strengthening of farmer know-how are also areas of major intervention for IICA.

Though we have expanded our purpose, IICA continues to develop the rural sector, which is firmly grounded in our founding mandate. We are promoting agrotourism through our newly launched Caribbean AgriTourism Network, strengthening farmer, women, and youth organizations, promoting rural connectivity and the bioeconomy as key strategic interventions to revitalize the rural economy. Under our Leaders of Rurality initiative, we recognized individuals who have contributed to significant transformations to the agriculture and rural milieu. I am very proud of our recipient from The Bahamas, and face of our Buy Local, Buy Fresh, Buy Bahamian campaign, Mr. Deon Gibson is now serving as special advisor to Minister Sweeting. We also honored Gillian Goddard and Ramgopaul Roop from Trinidad and Tobago and Joelin Santos from the Dominican Republic. I commend these trailblazing Leaders of Rurality.

We also believe that digital agriculture presents enormous opportunities to increase efficiencies in the agriculture sector and to solve many lingering challenges for small holder farming in the region. We at IICA are leading the charge on this front, and as an example of this effort, responding to a direct request from the Ministers of Agriculture of the region during COVID -19, we have designed two digital applications, an agricultural extension app to support remote extension services to farmers and an agricultural trade portal which will attempt to increase interaction and opportunities for intra-regional trade amongst member states. We are also looking towards the start of several important regional projects in food and nutrition security and Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) measures during this year.

Another important activity that is aligned with the action of the Institute in the Caribbean Region is the Hemispheric Initiative on Water and Agriculture that seeks to find solutions through innovative approaches that address various problems affecting water and soil availability and quality, in relation to agricultural infrastructure development, exposure to drought and flooding, the sustainable use of underground water and the institutional capacity of the relevant stakeholders. The main objective of this hemispheric initiative is to strengthen capacities and foster strategic public-private partnerships in IICA member countries, by providing to ministries of Agriculture and lead agencies, in a bid to improve the integrated management and efficient use of water in agriculture. In addition, the above-mentioned activities are developed in the framework of Hemispheric Partnership for Food Security and Sustainable Development which focuses on promoting a new generation of policies and capacities for more resilient and sustainable agriculture and agri-food systems. It is an effort that complements and seeks to project what is proposed in the MTP, along with the Institute’s own technical cooperation actions, recognizing climate action as a priority. October 3-5, 2023, IICA will be hosting its 22nd Inter-American Board of Agriculture Meeting, what we normally call the IABA Meeting. The IABA is the highest Governing Body of IICA and is comprised by the Ministers of Agriculture of the Hemisphere. We look forward to hosting a very successful meeting and charting a vibrant, impactful agriculture and rural development agenda for the coming years. This is a very timely opportunity to align the decisions coming from the IABA

with the decisions that will be taken in the Caribbean Week of Agriculture taking place one week later.

So, CWA 2023 promises to be an exciting event which will provide participants with a unique opportunity to charter a sustainable path for the future through defining key solutions for transforming and strengthening the resilience of our regional agri-food system in the Caribbean.

I encourage all interested stakeholders to register early and participate actively in this 17th CWA. I also invite you to visit our IICA Booth where we will be showcasing our new Centre for the Agriculture of Tomorrow (CIMAG) and our Observatory of Public Policies for Agrifood Systems.

I and our IICA team look forward to welcoming you at CWA 2023 in The Bahamas October 9 to 13!