Ghana is to host the World Packaging Organisation Board Meeting in May next year. The two-day meeting, which is the first to be held in Africa, will attract nearly 40 Executives of the organisation. The President of the Institute of Packaging, Ghana, Kofi Essuman announced this at this year's Annual General Meeting of the Institute in Accra. He said as part of the global conference there will be an African Packaging Summit which will be highly beneficial to Ghana. Giving his report for the past year, Mr. Essuman said a major achievement was the approval and registration of a bar code issuing body in Ghana. The project was initiated by the Institute in conjunction with the Ghana Standards Board, Unilever Ghana and the Ministry of Trade and Industry. According to Mr. Essuman prior to this, no country in the ECOWAS sub-region was a member of GSI system and companies that needed bar codes for their products had to obtain it from South Africa, Kenya, UK or Brussels. He announced plans to establish a Packaging Resource Center in the country. Mr. Essuman said at the last world Packaging Organisation meeting in Poland a draft curriculum for the study of packaging was adopted. He said the 2006 World Star Packaging Award has been conferred on a Ghanaian company Polykraft. Two students also received recognition for their entries to the World Students Star Awards held in Turkey. The Executive Secretary of the Institute, Mrs. Caroline Tsikata said the Institute continues to enjoy a lot of goodwill in the International Packaging Community and Ghana needs to take advantage to help raise the standard of packaging in the country. She said the inability of local goods to compete with foreign goods on the local and global market is partly due to poor packaging.