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CARDI Looking To Bring Heat-Resistant Crops To Saint Lucia

Saint Lucia is getting help from the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI) to reposition agriculture to cope with the impacts of climate change.

“We are now looking at bringing in, in collaboration with the World Vegetable Centre, we are looking at bringing in varieties that are heat-resistant,” CARDI’s representative in Saint Lucia, Andre Barry Innocent, disclosed.

During a recent appearance on the ‘Agriculture On The Move’ programme, Innocent explained that the varieties included heat-resistant tomatoes and sweet peppers.

“We are going to bring in that batch for now, test them, validate them and then we’re bringing in some more in response to the current heatwave,” the CARDI official stated.

Innocent explained that climate change, featuring severe winds, flooding, and pest and disease spikes, was taking its toll on agriculture.

As a result, he said CARDI’s response was to introduce resistant crops.

Innocent revealed that with the assistance of the Taiwan-headquartered World Vegetable Centre, CARDI was considering sweet potato plants that show resistance to the sweet potato weevil for some of the other Islands his organisation serves.

He also disclosed that CARDI was looking at drought and saline-resistant crops.

The CARDI official noted that climate change had caused high sea levels and seawater ‘intrusion’, causing soil salinity.

“There is a lot of research ongoing, a lot of discussions, not only in Saint Lucia but all the fourteen countries that CARDI has offices in. We are all working together for the Caribbean to ensure we do our best to reposition the Caribbean in light of the current phenomenon of climate change,” Innocent stated.

 

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6 COMMENTS

  1. Life needs heat. How man crops you see growing in the arctic. This doomsday climate cult needs to stop before they destroy everything.

  2. JUST SAY YALL WANT TO INTRODUCE, LAB GROWN FOODS, SIMULATED FOOD AND ALL KING OF WAYS TO GROW FOOD IN A SHORT SPACE OF TIME. FOR MASS PRODUCTION…….BUT WE DONT AGREE, FOOD NEED HEAT TO GROW EVEN HUMANS, NONSENSE.

  3. What a joke, what we need is to grow good food for people, organic, without pesticides, and all chemicals.
    Lets train for that, then we will have a healthy nation of people.

  4. Commercially grown food is big pharma ideology, hence the quantum illnesses that derive from it. Lucian live a double side consumption life style.
    1. They will bark by all means what is good and what is unhealthy.
    2. When your back turn you see them at long lines buying the same shit the talked about few min. ago.

    We black people is destine not to learn

  5. CARDI is bringing in these heat resistant varieties in collaboration with World Vegetable Centre. I have been to a workshop at World Vegetable Centre this year, and seen what they do, they use hand pollination (manually brush the flower parts together of heat resistant plants of same family but often from wild varieties or relatives whilst the flower is still attached to the plant required for pollination to cause fertilization) and they use natural plant breeding to produce these heat resistant plants. It is not GMO or synthetic. It is the same thing the butterflies and bees do whilst looking for nector. I actually did some training with them on hand pollination of Sweet peppers. I commend and highly congratulate CARDI for taking proactive measures and responding to current regional food security issues with natural and sustainable development methodologies. This was very innovative of CARDI and a good initiative. Well done CARDI.

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