I am most honoured to be addressing this congress, with delegates from no fewer than 70 countries present, and an impressive line-up of scientists, academics and executives of large food companies making presentations related to "Food Science Solutions in an Evolving World". As is the case in most areas, food scientists have to keep abreast of new technologies to maintain a competitive edge.
We are truly proud to welcome you to our country. Just a few weeks ago we had 32 countries in South Africa, competing for the coveted Soccer World Cup. A legacy of the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup is the mobilisation of more than 15 million people to date in the 1GOAL campaign. "I support 1GOAL: Education for All and call on world leaders to provide education for 72 million children worldwide by 2015".
With 70 countries here, more than twice times 32, surely we can support another important goal, and that is that all people have access to enough safe and nutritious food.
There are many things that we generally take for granted in our lives that we could actually live without, even things that we have become quite dependent on, like cellular phones, electricity in our homes, and fossil fuel driven vehicles.
Only a few generations ago we had none of these things, and the human population not only survived but expanded. Now there are almost 7 billion of us, still growing, and placing enormous demands on our planet's limited resources, particularly in respect of the two things we cannot do without: food and water.
Without clean, safe water, people can survive only a few days. We can survive longer without food, but people who don't have sufficient quantities of the right kind of nourishment live in a state of constant preoccupation with getting sustenance for themselves and their families, and their full human potential can never be realised. This, sadly, is how over a billion people in the world today exist, including many in South Africa.
The first of the eight millennium development goals (MDGs), agreed to by all United Nation member countries 10 years ago, is to halve poverty and malnutrition by 2015. In fact, this target was set at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, organised by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO).
The estimated number of undernourished people in developing countries at that time was 824 million. In 2009, the number had climbed to over a billion people. This does not bode well for meeting the MDG commitment and with climate change looming, as well as an ever increasing population to feed, the challenges are formidable.
And yet, the world produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, sufficient to provide everyone in the world with at least 2 720 kilocalories a day. Much of this food, however, is not produced where the world's poorest people live.
In the global effort to eradicate hunger and malnutrition, the reality that has to be confronted is that many people in the world either do not have sufficient land and resources to grow their own food, or do not have sufficient income to buy enough food.
Africa, for example, despite being endowed with considerable mineral wealth and some of the world's richest diversity of wildlife, fish, vegetation and livestock, continues to battle with high levels of poverty and underdevelopment.
The FAO defines food security as a situation in which all people, at all times, have access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. We are a long, long way from this.
Supporting small scale agriculture and the ability of households to produce food for own consumption and exchange surely has a vital role to play in the fight to end hunger and malnutrition.
As is the case in many other countries, South Africa's research institutions and universities are conducting biotechnology research to increase production of crops suited to local conditions, increase crop nutritional value and to improve preservation and processing methods resulting in novel and improved food products.
For example research, is being conducted on understanding the nutritional components of food indigenous to South Africa, with the aim of making those with a high nutritional value available and accessible to the majority of people.
However, although this kind of research is important and could assist in achieving more sustainable and reliable farm output, the immediate practical reality that confronts the world in its attempt to eradicate hunger remains that many of the world's poorest people do not have access to agricultural land, or are unable to use their land optimally for a variety of reasons, or live in areas that simply do not have potential to meet their food requirements throughout the year.
Food either has to be stored to ensure sufficient supplies at all times, or has to be moved in some form from where it is produced to where it is ultimately consumed. Any serious attempt to eradicate hunger and malnutrition therefore has to address a range of post–harvest challenges to ensure food can be stored with minimum spoilage, and arrive at its destination in the best possible condition.
Food storage has been part of human civilisation since the domestication of plants and animals began, over 10 000 years ago. Transportation and trade in food probably followed not much later, for the simple reason that food could not be grown equally well in all areas or in all seasons.
And this is still the case today, even in some of the richest agricultural areas of the world there are periodic droughts, floods and outbreaks of disease, causing crop failures and livestock losses.
We need look no further than the last two months. Food relief has not yet reached 3 000 people affected by flooding due to torrential rains in the Democratic Republic of Congo in July. In Russia, four months without rain and record temperatures have resulted in the loss of at least one quarter of the country's crops.
Russia is the world's third largest exporter of wheat and this drought has resulted in the doubling of world wheat prices in the last two months. Typhoons affecting China, Vietnam, Philippines and Thailand resulted in the flooding of seven million hectares of farmland in China alone. 40 000 hectares of crop lands were washed away and 50 000 household affected by heavy rainfall and flash floods in Orissa, India.
The list is incomplete but none parallel the recent disastrous floods in Pakistan. The European Commission on Humanitarian Aid reports that 20 million people have been affected with half of these in need of immediate humanitarian assistance.
These natural disasters underline the obligation on us to not only promote more global support for sustainable agricultural production in developing countries, but also to intensify our efforts to find realistic solutions for the storage, prevention of spoilage and distribution of safe and nutritious food.
Food production by its very nature is precarious. It is manifestly clear that better processing, packaging, storage and transportation of food is vital to achieving our food security objectives. And that is what food science is all about: ensuring that farm produce is converted into safe, varied and nutritious food products, ultimately finding their way to the consumer.
Post-harvest and cold-chain technologies, including technologies for cooling, disease control, preservation, sorting, packaging, storage and transport, are evolving at a rapid pace.
Food scientists are constantly seeking to improve techniques for processing, storing and transporting products, and their work is obviously of great importance. Everyone has to eat, and the vast majority of the world's population does not eat food grown in their own backyard. I am sure all of us here rely on what is grown by others, processed in various ways, and delivered in a safe and fresh condition to the shelves of our local supermarket.
It is important that we do not lose sight of the billion people who just don't get enough to eat. Their plight is not the consequence of too little food produced in the world, but is the result of poverty, availability and affordability of food.
Some of us may still be around when the nine billionth person to occupy our planet is born, quite possibly in rural Asia or rural Africa. Is that 9 billionth person destined to become the two billionth hungry person? Will that child have clean water to drink? Or will we have gone far beyond meeting our millennium development goals by then, and be well on the way to the complete eradication of poverty and hunger?
What we do know is that our present trajectory is simply not sustainable, not only in the growing numbers of people who are undernourished, but in what we are doing to our natural resources.
Amongst the many interesting papers to be presented at this Congress, Sir David King will tell us more about what needs to be done to avoid a path of self destruction. Some hard choices will definitely have to be made.
I wish you well in your deliberations during this Congress. You are dealing with one of world's most fundamental challenges, that is getting food in an acceptable condition from the fields to the seven billion people who cannot live without it.
Thank you for this opportunity to address you.
Source: Department of Science and Technology
Opening address by the Deputy Minister of Science and Technology, Derek Hanekom, at the 15th World Congress of Food Science and Technology, Cape Town International Convention Centre
