Eradicating hunger in Africa by 2025 is achievable - if Africa's leaders champion it and promote improved crop production and healthy eating, the head of the UN food and agriculture agency says.
Jose Graziano da Silva said the Food and Agriculture Organisation believes hunger can be eradicated around the globe "in a generation - in our lifetime" if there is a political commitment by world leaders to ensure that all their citizens get access to nutritious food.
"We are not talking about sending a man to the moon or something that complicated," he said. "We have the technology. We have the expertise. We have the things that we need to do it."
Graziano said the World Food Program looked at how the 62 countries that have achieved the first UN Millennium Development Goal - reducing extreme poverty by half - did it before the target date of the end of 2015, and it found three key factors.
First, he said, was "political will" and leadership, because improving food security involves improvements not only in agriculture but in nutrition, health, water supplies and storage facilities, to name a few.
"If the president doesn't take the lead, or the prime minister ... it doesn't work," he said.
Second, Graziano said, is improving agricultural performance and access to food.
"According to FAO, we have more than enough food produced nowadays to avoid hunger," he said. "People are hungry today because they don't have access to food ... because they cannot pay for the food or they cannot produce it any more as we did in the past."
One problem is that one-third to one-half of the food produced today is lost or wasted for a variety of reasons including bad storage, poor transportation and cultural issues, including the move from traditional cuisine to fast food, he said. A lot of food that could be consumed is thrown out, often because of huge portions.
Third, Graziano said, is improving the nutritional value of the food people eat.
"We are seeing more and more malnutrition rise in developed countries ... because of the quality of what (people) are eating," he said.
When children are listed by income, for example, "you see in families with the lowest income a proportion of obese and malnourished (youngsters) similar to the families that have high level income," he said.
Graziano said the FAO is promoting the best practices collected from around the world to eradicate hunger, especially in Africa, "where we have the worst situation at the moment." He expressed hope that an African Union summit in January will set a target to eradicate hunger in Africa by 2025.
"All countries in Africa can do it ... with the proper assistance FAO is giving them," he said.
