Beirut- Lebanese President Michel Aoun underlined the concerted Arab efforts to confront the issue of food security and secure food and agricultural products for Arab countries.
Aoun’s remarks came while receiving agriculture ministers of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq participating in the quadripartite meeting in Beirut.
Aoun called for the need to launch the Arab Common Market to improve trade exchanges and address food shortages in order to achieve food integration, especially in light of the difficulties and the global food crisis.
Aoun hoped for the completion of a comprehensive agriculture memorandum of understanding in the plant and animal sectors.
The Syrian Minister of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform, Mohammed Hassan Qatana said that the meeting aims to overcome the difficulties and problems facing the exchange of agricultural products within the four countries.
He stressed the need for unifying the administrative procedures related to plant quarantine, veterinary quarantine, the issue of transit, standard specifications and various technical and administrative procedures that facilitate agricultural exchange between the four countries.
“When we reach a unified work program between the four countries on the relative increases in agricultural products, an added value will be achieved for farmers and at the same time the exchange of production between countries, thus achieving integration between the four countries and the food security that we lost in the recent period as a result of the difficulty of importing production requirements and the difficulty of exporting the rest of the products” Minister Qatana said.
Source: Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA)