Tema, Sept. 16, GNA - Participants at the regional conference on Warehouse Receipt Systems ended their discussion with a field trip to Novel Commodities Ghana Limited (NCGL) on Friday to study best practices of the scheme and how it could be replicated in other West African countries.

NCGL is a branch of Novel Commodities (NC) international, soft commodities trading company registered in Geneva, Switzerland. Receiving the participants at the office premise in Tema, Mr Dan Kwame Obimpeh, General Manager of NCGL, said the parent company (NC) had assumed the integrated management of logistics chain, from products sourcing to the ultimate delivery to customers.

He said his outfit imported mainly rice and sugar from both Vietnam and Brazil.

Mr Obimpeh said NCGL imported three kinds of quality rice, namely African Queen, Labala and Baba from Vietnam.

He said Ghanaians, mostly food joint operators, favoured the Labala and Baba kinds of Vietnamese rice.

Labala is liked mostly by those who used it to prepare the Ghanaian dish waakye" whiles Baba is preferred for 93omo tuo" for its binding capacity, he said.

He said the company's market knowledge and risk management were the main attributes enabling it to guarantee competitive services and quality products.

Participants, mainly drawn from Ghana, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Togo, Benin, Mali, Nigeria and Burkina Faso, toured the 10, 300 metric tonnes storage capacity of the company's warehouse.

The participants, who were composed of government officials, researchers, development partners and business executives, are in the country to discuss the opportunities of Ghana's warehouse receipt pilot project and how it could be replicated in other West African countries.

The two-day forum was organised by the Ghana Grains Council (GCC) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Accra. USAID, through its Agribusiness and Trade Promotion and the Agricultural Development and Value Chain Enhancement (ADVANCE) and Expanded

Agribusiness and Trade Promotion projects, aim to increase the value and volume of intra-regional trade in their respective value chains along the major commercial corridors of participating countries.

The projects focus on agricultural value chain that includes maize, onion, livestock, meat, millet or sorghum, rice and poultry.

ADVANCE is a four year programme that aims at transforming Ghana's agricultural sector in selected agricultural staple commodities to achieve increased competitiveness on the domestic, regional and international markets.

GCC is a private-led industry group established in February 2010 to self regulates the Ghana Warehouse Receipt System.