The 26th Annual Meeting of the Food Crisis Prevention Network, “which serves as the platform for deliberation on food production and food security in Africa,” opened on Tuesday in Accra, Ghana, the Ghana News Agency reports. The three-day forum will examine “the agricultural and food situation for the 2010/2011 cropping season and come out with measures on tackling food crises,” according to the news service. Food security officials from the Sahel and West Africa are attending the forum, in addition to representatives from international groups, including the Economic Community Of West African States, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, Oxfam, UNICEF and the World Food Program.  

At the opening session, Alhousseini Bretaudeau, executive secretary of the Permanent Inter State Committee for the Control of Drought in the Sahel (CILSS), “noted that livestock contributed an estimated 44 percent of the agricultural GDP in the Sahel and West Africa,” the news service writes. “It is a source of income and contributes to reducing food insecurity through the provision of macro and micro-nutrients such as protein, calcium, vitamins and zinc,” he added. “Bretaudeau appealed to governments and food security organisations within the regions to put in place early detection systems for drought and other food crises in order to mitigate the common food crisis that usually plagued countries.” 

Kofi Awoonor, chairman of the Council of State, highlighted the need to modernize farming methods and infrastructure. Awoonor also “called for closer collaboration between governments and other organisations in the fight against food crises that usually plagued countries on the continent,” GNA reports. Nii Amassah Namoale, deputy minister of agriculture in-charge of fisheries for Ghana, also spoke at the forum (12/14).