Average annual rainfall is around 1,150 mm and 75 per cent of it falls in the rainy season, which is the whole problem.

Dry season yield drops to around 31,800 cubic metres a day against demand of 54,600, and the utility has reported stream production deficits as steep as 60 per cent, with the Clozier plant falling from 40,000 gallons to 7,000. Grand Etang, the crater lake, is a backup supporting the Annandale system and it depletes too.

Carriacou and Petite Martinique are a different island entirely in this respect. With limited groundwater and no permanent streams they depend almost entirely on rainwater harvesting, and 91 per cent of households there rely on cisterns as their main storage, supplemented by two private desalination operations. Hurricane Beryl damaged both the Carriacou plant and the Petite Martinique desalination plant in July 2024.

Nutmeg is around 9 per cent of the harvested area and provides income to roughly 30 per cent of the population, and Grenadian yields at 579 kg per hectare are well above the regional average of 372. A nutmeg seed is on the national flag.

Do not let anyone tell you it recovered from Hurricane Ivan. The 2004 and 2005 storms destroyed 555,000 nutmeg trees, reported as more than 90 per cent, against pre hurricane production of around 2,000 tonnes a year worth about $13 million. By 2011 recovery was still under 15 per cent of pre hurricane volumes. Trees take seven to nine years to first harvest and twenty to reach full potential, and a current problem is that many farmers unknowingly planted male trees that will never fruit.

We could not verify a Grenada specific food import percentage and are not attaching the CARICOM regional figure to it.

th island produce, spices, cocoa and vanilla.

For eating at the source, Belmont Estate is a working organic farm that takes you through growing, harvesting, fermenting and sun drying cocoa into chocolate, with a restaurant and a goat dairy. Belmont and the Grenada Chocolate Company were both certified organic in 2003, and Belmont was the first farm to supply organic beans to the chocolate company.

The national dish, oil down, is worth understanding properly: breadfruit and provisions layered in a pot under dasheen leaves and simmered in coconut milk until the oil separates. It is a communal one pot meal with no packaging at all.

Belmont Estate and the Grenada Chocolate Company were both certified organic in 2003, and Belmont was the first farm to supply organic beans to the chocolate company. Crayfish Bay at Victoria is a small working organic cocoa estate you can actually sleep on, and the Diamond Chocolate Factory at Victoria is farmer owned.

The Grenada Chocolate Company, founded in 1999 by Mott Green, appears to have been the first chocolate making company anywhere in a cocoa producing country, keeping all processing and packaging on the island with every worker on the same pay.

Beyond cocoa the picture is less documented, and nutmeg is not generally certified organic, so do not extend the claim past the crop that earns it.

The government committed under the Caribbean Challenge to 25 per cent nearshore and 25 per cent terrestrial protection by 2020. Its three marine protected areas cover approximately 4 per cent of nearshore coastal resources, and its ten terrestrial protected areas approximately 6 per cent of the land.

What exists is good. Grand Etang National Park and Forest Reserve protects rainforest and montane cloud forest along the central ridge and acts as the primary watershed for the island's rivers. Sandy Island Oyster Bed Marine Protected Area off Carriacou, established 31 July 2010, covers reef, mangrove and seagrass from the Tyrrel Bay mangroves to Lauriston.

The Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park deserves its reputation. Created by Jason deCaires Taylor and opened to the public in May 2006, it was the world's first underwater sculpture park, built in pH neutral cement textured for coral to attach, sited in sand at five to eight metres. It was made after Ivan and Emily wrecked the reefs, it draws divers away from stressed natural reef, and it helped push the government to designate the site a marine protected area.

Monitoring is led from the University of Chester with Toledo Zoo and the IUCN Pigeon and Dove Specialist Group. Its habitat is fragmented, only partly protected, and under development pressure, so we name the sanctuaries and publish no site level detail.

The Grenada frog is also endemic and Critically Endangered, one of only two endemic terrestrial vertebrates on the island, confined to cloud forest above 300 metres and squeezed by an invasive whistling frog.

The correction that matters most: Grenada's mona monkeys are introduced. They are a West African species brought over during the slave trade in the late 1600s to 1700s, possibly descended from as few as one female. They are not native, not endemic, and not a Grenadian biodiversity asset. Fruit is sold for feeding them at Grand Etang and we do not endorse it.

Traditional wooden boatbuilding in Carriacou and Petite Martinique was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2023. Shipwrights choose trees for their natural bends and contours and fell them at the right phase of the moon on the guidance of elders. Windward on Carriacou is one of the last places in the Caribbean where boats are still built on the beach, and on launch day the island turns out for the blessing, with godparents appointed and the name revealed on a red flag.

For things you can carry, Frank Belfon, who trades as The Culture Man at the Grand Anse Craft Market, weaves baskets, hats, birds and handbags from coconut branches by hand, having learned by watching his mother work wild pine. White Cane Industries in St George's is a social enterprise where blind and partially sighted Grenadians weave rattan cane into baskets, mats and bags and re cane furniture. Calabash bowls, used to serve oil down, are sold at Art Fabrik and, painted, at Simply Carriacou in Hillsborough.

Two honest notes. Grenada's national intangible heritage inventory lists 13 elements and contains no plant craft at all. And we could not establish whether the woven spice baskets sold with nutmeg are made in Grenada or imported, so do not assume.

Importing polystyrene was banned from 1 September 2018, all single use plastics including bags, cutlery, plates, straws and cups from 1 February 2019, and the sale of styrofoam from 1 March 2019 with a complete ban on its use a month later. The then environment minister who drove it, Simon Stiell, later became UN Climate Change Executive Secretary.

Disposal is the pressure point. The Perseverance Landfill on the west coast is the primary site, semi aerobic, sits about 500 metres from Halifax harbour and is nearing capacity, with only three of its six cells operating after the first two collapsed within a year.

After Hurricane Beryl the waste authority set up five debris sites on Carriacou plus temporary storage on Petite Martinique, and the government put EC$7 million into a three month clean up.

Only three of its six cells have been operating, the first two having collapsed within a year.

Grenada has moved on recycling and home composting through OECS and Recycle Organics programmes, though we found no published national rate. After Hurricane Beryl the waste authority set up five debris sites on Carriacou plus temporary storage on Petite Martinique, with EC$7 million committed to a three month clean up.

The Big Drum or Nation Dance honours the West African ancestors brought under slavery, fusing the dance and music of nations such as the Akan of Ghana with colonial and other African influences, and it is performed at Maroons, village festivals held in spring to call for rain, transmitted almost entirely by oral tradition.

Be accurate about status. The Big Drum is not on any UNESCO list. Grenada's two inscriptions are Carriacou and Petite Martinique boatbuilding in 2023 and Shakespeare Mas in 2024. The Carriacou Maroon and String Band Music Festival at the end of April is promoted by the national tourism authority, so treat the festival as the visitor facing layer over a village tradition that exists without it.

At Sauteurs, Leapers' Hill is where a band of around forty Kalinago jumped to their deaths in 1651 rather than be taken by French colonists, and the French named the place for it. It is a mass death site. Go, and treat it as one.