CPS urges healthy school snacks, but prices locally make that a hard ask

GREAT BAY--With the new school year underway, St. Maarten’s Collective Prevention Services is urging families to prioritize healthy breakfasts and snacks that keep children alert, focused, and ready to learn. The guidance is sound, nutrition fuels attention and memory, and skipping meals or relying on sugary ultra-processed foods can lead to fatigue, mood swings, and weaker learning outcomes.

The challenge for many parents is not willpower, it is affordability. In St. Maarten and across the Caribbean, the cost of a basic healthy diet sits among the highest in the world, so many households face a price wall even when they want to follow public health advice.

United Nations agencies report that Latin America and the Caribbean has the highest regional cost of a healthy diet. The average for the region was about 3.89 US dollars per person per day and within that figure the Caribbean subregion was higher still at about 4.23 US dollars per person per day. Those costs contribute to a stark outcome: more than 131 million people in the region could not afford a healthy diet as of 2020.

Subsequent updates continue to show pressure. FAO’s statistical series indicates the regional cost reached about 4.56 PPP dollars per person per day in 2022, underscoring that healthier baskets remain expensive relative to incomes.

Micro-level studies paint the same picture for Caribbean households. A comparative analysis in Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines estimated that low-income families would need between 22 percent and 47 percent of their earnings to purchase a nutritionally adequate diet. That gap explains why cheaper refined grains and sugary snacks often displace fresh produce and lean proteins in school lunchboxes.

Against this reality, CPS’s message is viewed as timely. Breakfast, fruit and vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, plenty of water, and family meals that build long-term habits, these are exactly the patterns associated with better attention, steadier energy, stronger immunity, and healthier growth.

The policy question is how to make these choices the easy choices in St. Maarten. Regional public health authorities have already set out a toolkit. CARPHA’s Six-Point Policy Package, endorsed by CARICOM bodies, calls for measures such as school nutrition standards, front-of-package labelling, marketing restrictions that protect children, and trade or fiscal policies that shift relative prices away from sugary drinks and ultra-processed snacks and toward healthier staples.

There are also Caribbean examples that connect farms to schools, so that cafeterias and canteens source fresh, in-season produce locally. A case study from Nevis highlights both the potential and the hurdles: schools can improve diet quality and support local farmers, yet coordination, contracts, and child acceptance of fresh foods need attention to keep costs down and supply reliable.

What this means for families is straightforward. CPS’s advice aligns with the science, but families will succeed more often when public and private partners lower the price barrier. Practical steps on the policy side include nutrition standards for school canteens and vendors, and scaled procurement that buys local when possible to reduce logistics costs. These measures are not about telling parents to try harder, they are about aligning the food environment with CPS’s message so parents can do what they already want to do.

In the meantime, CPS’s emphasis on simple habits remains useful. A real breakfast before school, water as the default drink, and fruits that are in season locally such as soursop, guava, passion fruit, and mango can stretch budgets. As St. Maarten begins its new school year, CPS continues to stress the role of nutrition in both academic performance and long-term health, while regional data show that affordability remains a central barrier to putting those recommendations into practice.