CARDI ready for natural disaster

By Michelle Nurse On Nov 25, 2014

IF a natural disaster were to ‘wipe-out’ crops in any Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Member State, farmers would be able to “build back the source of plant material in a year or so” with the help of seed banks operated by the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI).

Executive Director of the institution, Dr Arlington Chesney, was speaking about the importance of regional seed banks during an interview with Business Day earlier this week at CARDI’s head office on the St Augustine Campus, University of the West Indies.

In recent years we’ve observed that the incidents of severe weather patterns and weather events were occurring more frequently. Therefore we had to make a special effort to plan for these incidents and for how we would recover from them. CARDI has also been revising how we train farmers to do things on their farms so that they can potentially reduce the impact of these climate change-related weather events.”