Food and nutrition security are the fundamental challenges to human welfare and economic growth in Africa. Low food availability and profound poverty have caused the number of undernourished people on the continent to rise considerably in recent years. An estimated 200 million people in Africa can now be classed as undernourished - almost 20 percent more than in the early 1990s. The dismal level of food and nutrition security obvious in many African countries at both the national and the household level means that while 14 percent of the global population is undernourished, the figure is nearly double (27 percent) for Africa.