Promoting healthy foods could solve global problem

Promoting healthy foods could solve global problem – Dr. Ramsammy

Aug 06, 2014 News

Annually, the Latin America and Caribbean Region spends US$47.3B on advertisements promoting processed snacks. If US$4B of that sum was spent on promoting healthy foods, the world’s food security problem would be solved.
This notion was expressed by Agriculture Minister, Dr. Leslie Ramsammy, as he gave a brief address at the “Hunger Free Initiative for Latin America and Caribbean” conference, held last week in Mexico City.
The initiative started in 2005 to ensure that the Latin America and Caribbean Region is hunger-free. There are 43 million people in the Region who do not have access to adequate amounts of food daily. Looking closer to home, about six million people in the Caribbean, with the bulk coming from Haiti, are exposed to hunger.
According to Dr. Ramsammy, some countries like Guyana have full availability of foods, but there are still some pockets of the population that are lacking, but that depends on the conditions. He related that while discussing hunger there are two pivotal areas that need to be looked at: food production to fill one’s stomach and micro-nutritional deficiency.
He said Guyana has reached the goal of producing foods and the country’s average calories are 3,000, which is higher than the recommended amount.
“Nutritional security is not just about filling one’s belly and all countries’ situations have worsened because of change of habits…We eat a lot of processed foods, every family has canned food, eating a lot of fast foods and people are becoming overweight,” Dr. Ramsammy said.
At the conference there were several recommendations, including changing eating habits, cooking at home, and implementing standards for foods, salts, sugar and transfat. But, changing habits of the population would be the most challenging, Dr. Ramsammy admitted.
He stressed that almost every household in Guyana is exposed to television broadcasting of western programmes and food advertisements. This, he asserted, has contributed to the change of taste.
However, Government has been trying to provide students with either a nutritional snack or hot meal, depending on the areas. He said many countries cannot afford to feed every child and this is an area Governments in the region want to address.
Dr. Ramsammy said that Brazil, Guyana’s neighbour to the South, feeds more than half of its student population while Venezuela, Guyana’s neighbour to the west, is trying to feed every child.

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Promoting healthy foods could solve global problem – Dr. Ramsammy

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