Accra, Nov. 4, GNA - A five-day regional consultation meeting to discuss and ensure food security for the Sahel region and West Africa opened in Accra in Wednesday with a call on member countries to develop the capacity to use modern technology to generate timely and early warning agricultural statistics to aid in the cereal and food assessment in the countries.

Nii Amasah Namoale, Deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture, said timely and adequate agricultural information was also needed to formulate good policies and programmes to ensure food and raw material security as well as to assist countries to generate substantial output and productivity data on commodities.

The meeting, being attended by over 50 delegates from 17 countries, is being organised by the Permanent Inter States Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS) with financial and technical support from the USAID. Delegates would as part of their mandate, look at food production, especially cereal in 2008/2009 and make a projection for 2010 that would accordingly advice governments.

Nii Amasah said food security issues had become the concern of the current government especially when the global climate change was impacting negatively on the socio-economic efforts of the government. He said subsequently, government had put many programmes and policies in place to ensure that farmers had the right agriculture equipment to aid increase of their yields.

The Deputy Minister suggested that CILSS and development partners should examine, provide support and build capacity of member countries to provide good estimate and information on stock levels, import and export data, post-harvest losses as well as consumption levels. Mr Mohamed Yahya Ould Mohamed Mahmoud, Director General, Agriculture, Hydro and Meteo (AGRHYMET) Regional Centre, an institute under CILSS, said such a technical meeting served one of the surveillance systems which functions permanently through regular consultation frameworks designed to prevent food crisis.

That system, he said, enabled an almost permanent monitoring of the evolution of the food situation in the region through five annual meetings intended to monitor the agro-pastoral season, the evaluation of the agricultural production and the trade opportunities for agricultural products.

Mr Mahmoud expressed optimism that the meeting would be able to provide an opinion on the provisional agricultural productions and on the food situation for the incoming months thereby providing the decision makers with precious tools to enable them to facilitate their decision making for an improved management of food security in West Africa.