• More than 1 billion people in the world live in absolute poverty.
• 800 million people do not have enough food in order to sustain life and work.
• The great majority of these people live in the rural areas, and most of them are farmers

The main challenge facing farmers worldwide is how to increase world food production by 70 percent to meet the needs of a global population that will reach over 9 billion people by 2050. This production increase will have to be made:

• Using essentially the same land area
• Using less water
• Producing less greenhouse gases, and
• Conserving agricultural biodiversity