United Nations Radio

With its population set to double by 2050, Africa needs to triple its food production in the next four decades. FAO, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, says Africa has largely untapped resources of water which could be put to use to produce the much needed food and energy. UN Radio's Samir Imtair is attending a conference in Sirte, Libya on the subject and asked FAO chief Jacques Diouf, about the prospects of harnessing Africa's water resources in time:

FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf

Diouf: I'm hoping we will move from talking [the talk] to walking the talk. And the conference itself and its format would indicate that we are going in this direction instead of doing the analysis, looking at the causes, the consequences of the problem which we have to do but which we have done already.

Samir: Some participants they have doubts that because of the global financial crisis, it will be a little bit difficult to generate funds for these projects. What do you think?

Diouf: First, when we are preparing these types of projects, we are preparing for more than a decade. These targets are for 2020, 2025. You do not therefore build on situations that happened one year and next year may not happen. You look at what are the structural needs for addressing a structural problem. The structural problem is that there is hunger in the world. Instead of going down, the number of hungry people has increased and now we will be having almost a billion persons that are hungry. In addition, we need to double world food production between now and 2050 because by then we will be nine billion persons. It's all those structural elements that you build a structural programme.

Samir: Dr. Diouf, you called for an international summit to deal with the issues of food security.

Diouf: I think such a summit is indispensable, first, because we have seen in 2007 alone the number of hungry people, instead of going down by 43 million to achieve the goal of the World Food Summit and the Millennium Development Goal, increased by 75 million. Our projections out of the FAO annual document, the State of Food Insecurity, projects that in 2008, there will be an additional 40 million hungry people, bringing this total to one billion. We cannot sit and let this thing go and not do anything about it. We had a high level conference in June this year but that was essentially to address a crisis - what to do about the 20 countries that have been rioting with all the consequences - social, political, people dead, etc. and even a government topple - but now we have to address the root causes of the problem. Plus the World Food Summit of 1996 and the Millennium Development Summit targeted cutting by half the number of hungry people. But what does it mean? It means that the other half will continue to be hungry. I don't think this is acceptable in a world that has the capacity and the resources to eradicate totally hunger from the face of the face of the earth.

Narrator: FAO Director General Jacques Diouf. The Conference is organized by FAO together with the Libyan Government, the African Union, the African Ministers' Council on Water (AMCOW), the African Development Bank and the Economic Commission for Africa, among others

Producer: Samir Imtair/Derrick Mbatha
Duration: 3'54"