A two-day national meeting of experts on Agriculture Markets, Price Data Visualization and Early Warning System is being organised by FAO and Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare (MoAFW) from today. The meeting is attended by academicians, statisticians, policy makers and bankers.

In his inaugural speech, Prof. Abhijit Sen stressed on the importance of prediction that can be made through diversity and vastness of data, which can then be articulated by policy makers to make appropriate policy responses. He remarked and congratulated FAO and MOAFW on organising such a unique workshop, focusing on technical aspects of agriculture market integration and pricing.

Mr. Ashok Dalwai, CEO (NRAA) lay importance on access to information through technology, and ensure a two-way communication flow of data on agri-prices and related data. He also mentioned by providing farmers with price forecasting with information on non-food commodities, will help farmers to gain a larger market share and increase their incomes over their farming income. There is also a shift from physical to virtual market trading. This will be most crucial to achieve market integration.

Mr. Mukesh Srivastava, Senior Statistician, FAO talked about an international agricultural conference on data to be held in India in 2019 and related meeting last week in Bangkok with pan Asia members to monitor the Sustainable Development Goals, markets and price anomalies. He stressed on the importance of robust data sources to serve as good indicators.

The technical sessions have covered areas of systems and frameworks of agriculture market prices, intergration of agri-markets and identification of leading markets, agriculture price behaviour models and forecasting and to establish robust price monitoring system of agro-commodities.