An end to hunger in Africa?

The Herald reports:

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 U.N. food and agriculture agency said Friday.

Jose Graziano da Silva went even further in an interview with The Associated Press, saying the Food and Agriculture Organization believes that 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 Programme looked at how the 62 countries that have achieved the first U.N. Millennium Development Goal of reducing extreme poverty by half did it before the target date of the end of 2015, and it found three key factors.

That’s good news that 62 countries have managed it. The famines of the 1980s are not gone, not far less common.

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.

Probably, the most important.

Second, Graziano said, is improving agricultural performance and access to food. …

Third, Graziano said, is improving the nutritional value of the food people eat.

Which GE food can do.