Accra, March 29, GNA - Alhaji Muhammad Mumuni, Ghana's Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, has called for the elimination of obstacles to trade and economic relations between Ghana and Burkina-Faso while enforcing the laws against fraudulent activities.

"We need to do more to eliminate the obstacles to trade and economic relations and to enforce the laws of our countries against the activities of fraudulent persons who seek to abuse the facility of free movement of persons and goods for their own benefit," he stressed.

Alhaji Mumuni said this when he opened the 10th session of the Ghana-Burkina Faso Permanent Joint Commission for Cooperation in Accra on Tuesday.

The two-day programme brought together experts from the two countries to deliberate on matters of socio-cultural and economic importance that would improve the lives of their people. The experts would also discuss socio-cultural and economic policies in order to forge various agreements between the two countries for implementation over the next two years. Alhaji Mumuni appealed to the experts to use the session to identify and help the two countries to agree on common solutions to issues that remained problematic in the bilateral commercial exchanges and to come up with creative ways to address the challenges that prevented mutual cooperation.

He said the Ghana-Burkina Faso relationship had been characterized by common ethnicity and socio-cultural ties, especially between the people of the three Northern regions of Ghana and the southern frontier communities of Burkina-Faso. He said relations between them continued to remain cordial, and had been amplified by the establishment of sister-cities relationships between some towns and cities in Ghana and Burkina-Faso. Alhaji Mumuni described the activities between them as healthy signs of improving relationship, which sought to promote ECOWAS as a community and needed to be further strengthened to sustain the relations.

Mr Bedouma Alain Yoda, Burkinabe Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Cooperation, stressed the need for the implementation of decisions that the two countries arrived at during the Ninth Session to ensure the meaningfulness of the meetings. He called on the experts to discuss the increasing global food crisis and to see how best the two countries could build commercial partnerships to improve the living conditions of the people. "We need to solve the problems confronting us without any complacency," he said, and stressed that Burkina-Faso was satisfied with the way their students were being treated in Ghana and gave the assurance that his country would do everything possible to ensure that relations between the two countries were strengthened.