Officials from more than 40 countries convened this week in Tel Aviv for a five-day international conference on food and agriculture.
The meeting of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization went ahead as planned, despite earlier discussions among some organizers to cancel the meeting because of Israel’s 16-day cross-border fighting with Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon.
Finding ways to combat world hunger was a central topic of the conference.
The director general of the FAO, Jacques Diouf of Senegal, said there are 800 million starving people in the world, among them 200 million children younger than 5.
He said Israel could help combat hunger in such places as Asia and Africa by sharing the technology it has developed to increase food harvests in arid areas.
During the past 25 years, Israeli irrigation technology has enabled the country to increase harvest production by 12 percent without devoting more land for growing crops.
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